MUSIC REVIEWS : Juilliard Quartet Brings Light to Hindemith

The Hindemith centenary year--the composer’s 100th birthday took place last month--has netted happy surprises, which should be no surprise: Paul Hindemith’s music is known for its quality, if not for all its facets. Now is the time for more appreciation and more dissemination of it.

The Juilliard String Quartet brought Hindemith’s Fifth Quartet to a Coleman Chamber Concert in Beckman Auditorium at Caltech Sunday afternoon, and the pleasures in what for most of us is an unfamiliar piece resounded abundantly. It is a substantial work but not abstruse, and the lightnesses the ensemble found and projected in it were completely in character.

Fascinatingly, program notes for the event noted that this work, written in 1943 for the Budapest Quartet, had been played on the Pasadena series by that very ensemble, here, in 1947 and 1953. Another reminder that Southern California in mid-20th century boasted more than movie stars and good weather.

As could have been expected, the Juilliard’s way with the Fifth Quartet, which happens to be just three years older than the ensemble itself, brought freshness and passion, spontaneity and emotional probing to the work. The group--violins Robert Mann and Joel Smirnoff, violist Samuel Rhodes and cellist Joel Krosnick--did the same for the surrounding program, Beethoven’s B-flat Quartet, Opus 18, No. 6, and Dvorak’s Quartet in A-flat, Opus 105.

The bracing tautness of the ensemble’s playing of Opus 18 became slightly relaxed and measurably more lush when the players got to Dvorak’s wondrous, if in its outer movements empty-headed, Opus 105. Both approaches proved appropriate, stylish and, of course, welcome. The Juilliard Quartet remains the standard by which all other quartets must be judged.