By Lyn Bronson
Every once in a while you hear a performance so convincing and so inevitable you can’t imagine the work played any other way. That happened last night in Sunset Center Theater when the St. Petersburg String Quartet, presented by Chamber Music Monterey Bay, began its program with a mind blowing performance of the Shostakovich String Quartet No. 7 in F-sharp minor, Op. 106.
The four musicians in the quartet, violinists Alla Aranovskaya and Alla Krolevich, violist Boris Vayner and cellist Leonid Shukayev, are no strangers to us for Chamber Music Monterey Bay has presented them before. One of the most impressive aspects of their playing was their easy mastery and economy of resources so that they never seemed to be pushing for effect or overplaying their instruments. Violinists Aranovskaya and Krolevich played with impressive authority, and violist Vayner and cellist Shukayev both had dazzling moments of intensity and beauty.
