By Lyn Bronson

The Carmel Music Society presented the American String Quartet and famed pianist Menahem Pressler in the fourth concert of its present season last night at Sunset Center. If the sparks didn’t fly during the first half of the concert, the second half of the concert more than made up for it.

In the past pianist Menachem Pressler has been a frequent visitor with the Beaux Arts Trio, and on those occasions we consistently witnessed an extraordinary artist able to join with two other fine musicians and bring out the best in any work they performed.

The members of the American String Quartet, violinists Peter Winograd and Laurie Carney, violist Daniel Avshalomov and cellist Wolfram Koessel, are fine musicians and excellent players. Their playing in the Dvořák revealed many beauties inherent in the score. It was curious that Pressler’s role in the ensemble sometimes seemed more like an accompanist than the starring partner. The piano part of this quintet requires a strong dominant presence to carry the climatic moments, and it wasn’t always happening last night, for his playing often seemed muted and difficult to hear, even when his part was the most important. This is not to say that Pressler didn’t contribute mightily to the ensemble, for his extraordinary playing in the Dumka movement demonstrated the subtle layers of expressive dynamic inflection of which he is capable. His refined dynamics from pianissimo to forte (he never achieved a true fortissimo anywhere in this concert) were a marvel, and I don’t believe I have ever heard a better performance of this movement. His thoroughly precise playing in the other three movements also brought a lot of magic to the performance.

Curiously, although Pressler was performing on the Carmel Music Society’s nine-foot Hamburg Steinway concert grand, the sound coming to us seemed so distant and remote it gave the impression of a smaller piano with the lid closed and a blanket over the strings. Simply said, it was difficult most of the time to hear Pressler’s playing, and it didn’t help that the string players often failed to adjust their volume when the piano had the most important part. Still, this glorious quintet is a knockout piece and its magic never fails to steal our hearts.

The two opening works on the program, Beethoven’s String Quartet in G Major, Op. 18, and Prokofiev’s Quartet No. 2 in F Major, Op. 92, made little impact — the Beethoven sounded like an informal reading, and the Prokofiev, although achieving a much higher level of performance, seemed fractured and disjointed.

More and more it is difficult to escape the conclusion that perhaps the optimum venue for chamber music on the Monterey Peninsula is All Saints Church in Carmel. Its acoustics are perfect for smaller ensembles, the piano is excellent and the size of the church would have perfectly accommodated the small audience we observed at Sunset Center last night.

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