Panocha Quartet Plays in Laguna

The Panocha String Quartet offered more to admire than to love in a program of works by Mozart, Dvorak and Martinu at Laguna Beach High School on Monday, as part of the Laguna Beach Chamber Music Society series.

The four Czechoslovaks--Jiri Panocha and Pavel Zejfart, violins; Miroslav Sehnoutka, viola, and Jaroslav Kulhan, cello--played with exemplary matched tone and phrasing, inner balance and accurate intonation. But their interpretations stressed surface perfection at the expense of probing expressivity.

They opened with a poised, fluent, streamlined account of Mozart’s Quartet in G, K. 387. Those expecting warmth, charm and subtle explorations of light and shade were disappointed: The players tended toward taut, hurried, uninflected lines, sometimes with surprisingly wide shifts in dynamics. They were perhaps best in the lyricism of the slow movement.

Despite a promising beginning--delicate, shy and gentle--the four went on to deliver a rather bloodless account of Dvorak’s Quartet in E-flat, Opus 51, the least satisfying work on the program.

They seemed content to focus on a refinement of tone and phrasing that might have been suitable for a quartet by Ravel, but which scanted the sense of spontaneous, emotional overflow associated with Dvorak. Moreover, the work sounded more youthful and immature than it is, as a result of the episodic approach.

But they excelled in Martinu’s bustling, extroverted Quartet No. 4, appearing technically at ease with and interpretively sympathetic to the composer’s brusque, choppy rhythms, off-balance accents and pungent though not overly grating harmonic language.

Panocha and Sehnoutka also succeeded in prominent opportunities to impart a sense of personal voice: Panocha in a number of melodic passages that soared through the violin’s upper range; Sehnoutka in the appealing, meandering, folk-flavored scales which open the Adagio. The four again demonstrated impeccable ensemble in the big, joyful declamations before the final slicing chords.

The quartet played a Presto by Haydn as an encore.