Petrus Must Stumble A Bit Before It Soars

Petrus String Quartet Sunday, Sept. 29, The Met

The Spokane Chamber Music Association opened its 1996-97 season with an afternoon of music by Haydn, Debussy and Dvorak played with thorough professionalism by the Seattle-based Petrus Quartet. These excellent musicians seemed very much at home with the rhythmic energy and virtuosity of Dvorak. The performances of Debussy and Hadyn were less compelling.

The Petrus Quartet - violinists Leonid Keylin and Jean Wells Yablonsky, violist Vincent Comer and cellist David Sabee - is made up of experienced players who met under the umbrella of the Seattle Symphony, where they are all musicians.

The Petrus opened Sunday’s concert with vigorous reading of Haydn’s Quartet in F minor, Op. 20, No. 5. This is a work whose dark seriousness may have come as a surprise to those expecting the “18th-century drawing room” elegance sometimes associated with Haydn’s style. The tone was hearty and the tempos brisk - even headlong in the fugal finale. But the phrases often tumbled over each other too breathlessly for Haydn to make his points.

The Debussy Quartet was treated in much the same manner. Best-served by this approach were the vitality of the second movement, with its drum and guitarlike pizzicatos and those nearly orchestral surges of sound in the finale. Only occasionally did the Petrus Quartet playing give in to the lightness of Debussy’s impressionistic language. Intonation was a problem at climactic moments.

After intermission, Dvorak’s Quartet in C minor was another matter entirely. Here was an idiomatic performance charged with the energy of Dvorak’s Bohemian dance rhythms. The players reveled in Dvorak’s soloistic demands. It was a joy to hear.

The Petrus is a young ensemble, founded in 1994. It began this season with a significant personnel change. Keylin moved from playing second violin to first and Yablonsky was added as a new player. Sounds like a simple change, but it is not.

String quartets are sensitive organisms, not machines made up of interchangeable parts like a symphony orchestra. It takes time to absorb a new player into the sound and spirit of a quartet. What Sunday’s audience was witnessing, in my view, seemed to be a quartet-in-the-making, possibly a very good one.

What was missing was a secure sense of integrated timing, precise intonation and complete agreement on stylistic matters. These may come with time and experience playing together.

, DataTimes