The Dryden Strings: Fine And Taut

There were moments when time seemed to stand still in the program the Dryden String Quartet played in the Gildenhorn Recital Hall of the University of Maryland's Smith Center on Sunday. As violinist Nurit Bar-Josef suspended an eerie high harmonic, barely audible, for what seemed like an eternity and the rest of the ensemble paused and then joined her carefully, the audience held its collective breath. The music was the Shostakovich B-flat Minor Quartet No. 5, a piece with loud and emphatic moments that has, at its heart, a quiet and introspective Andante of surpassing beauty, and the Dryden gave it a spectacular reading.

It's no surprise that this is an unusually well matched ensemble. Violinist Nicolas Kendall and cellist Yumi Kendall (assistant principal cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra) are brother and sister, and violist Daniel Foster, the National Symphony Orchestra's principal violist, is their cousin. Bar-Josef, the NSO concertmaster, may not be related, but she shares their musical inclinations and adds extra passion to the mix. They've been playing together for almost two years.

The concert opened with the Mozart Quartet in F, K. 590, his last and his technically most challenging, full of close-harmony, rapid- fire ornamental passages and delicious musical chases. These were handled with lighthearted delicacy and a sense that it was all fun. The concluding Mendelssohn Quartet in E-flat, Op. 12, was rendered in supremely Mendelssohnian idiom from the quiet lyricism of its opening movement to the breathless swirling magic of the Allegretto.

Fearless, flexible and fiery Dryden Quartet

Some Curtis Institute of Music students don't seem to graduate so much as they just widen the already significant orbit of their careers and return to play concerts a little less often.

So it is with National Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef (Class of '96), violinist Nicolas Kendall ('01), his cellist sister Yumi Kendall (still a student), and violist Daniel Foster ('93), who have returned to the area in numerous configurations but arrived at Field Concert Hall on Sunday as the Dryden String Quartet.

String quartets usually spend years in gestation, but only 14 months after its debut, the Dryden Quartet required no handicaps and delivered some of the most thrilling quartet playing I've heard in years.

The group was fearless in its flexible use of tempo and audacious with its near-orchestral amplitude that could have become vulgar, but didn't. Interpretively, the sense of compromise, of hard-won common ground heard in more seasoned string quartets, wasn't apparent here. Everyone seemed to be unreservedly of the same mind (thanks, perhaps, to having all studied with John Kendall, Nicolas and Yumi's grandfather). And that mind has a youthful, I've-got-all-the-answers brashness. So strong was the group's conviction, I'm inclined to agree.

The best playing came at the beginning: Haydn's not-often-heard String Quartet No. 59 ("Rider"). Most Haydn interpreters focus on how the composer manipulated classical-era formulas with his highly original sense of musical narrative, but the Drydens exercised no such X-ray vision. They embraced the formulas, seizing upon all elements as occasions for musical humor, profundity and, above all, enjoyment. You don't realize how much you've missed the "enjoyment" part until you hear it, and realize it's an essential ingredient to this genial music that's too often overlooked.

Never was there any sense of lush repose in the group's high-tension treatment of Debussy's String Quartet, in which the music's potentially sprawling sonorities were knowingly etched by Bar-Josef's slim but lovely tone and solidified among the inner voices by violinist Kendall and violist Foster. Only in Beethoven's Quartet No. 8 Op. 59, No. 2 did the quartet show its age. The piece is huge on so many levels, but for all the group's smart tactics, it lacked interpretive strategy. The playing was unruly, but still so imposing that you hope the Drydens never become self-effacing.