Rossetti Quartet’s New Violinist a Plus for Festival

For several years, the Ventura Chamber Music Festival has established itself as a notable enterprise, in part through programming that has ushered in out-of-town performers and carefully mixed diversity with crowd-sating accessibility.

This year’s agenda takes a different turn, with the lion’s share of focus on one internationally known star, Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha, appearing in recital Thursday and as orchestral soloist Saturday at Ventura College Theater. Otherwise, the 2002 festival is largely populated with returnees, giving it a last-year’s-model air.

Violinist Corey Cerovsek, a festival regular, performs Wednesday, and the Rossetti String Quartet, an impressive group that appeared last year, has returned for two concerts, including one Friday at San Buenaventura Mission.

The Rossetti performance last Friday, in the lovely and agreeably resonant Community Presbyterian Church, gained an unexpected freshness with the debut of a new voice in the first violinist role.

Nina Bodnar, the formidable Rossetti leader, recently departed from the group and was replaced by the young, conspicuously gifted Timothy Fain, a Santa Monica native well-received in New York and elsewhere.

The result added drama to the evening. All ears were on the new kid, a quick study who started with the group only a week earlier but acquitted himself with aplomb in a meat-and-potatoes program of Haydn, Mozart and Borodin.

The program changed, too, with originally planned works swapped out for Haydn’s moving Quartet in D, Opus 20, No. 4 and Mozart’s Quartet in G, K. 387. It’s a logical enough pairing, the former having influenced the latter. Both works vary in emotional and digital intensity but arrive at a soft, sighing finale, like an introspective denouement.

Rossetti members have been together long enough to have established a musical bond. One could sense that, however bold and propulsive their sound, a settling process was underway, and things weren’t always seamless. The situation improved throughout the performance, however, with Fain’s dynamic presence in the lead. By the time Borodin’s crowd-pleasing Quartet No. 2 in D came after intermission, the quartet was in fine ensemble fettle.

Those familiar, dreamy melodies of the second and third movements were treated with proper care and subtlety, making what can be a confection a lustrous thing.