Simply sumptuous strings

Were it a car, the Guarneri String Quartet would be a 1964 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III. Only so luxurious a touring vehicle can serve as an analogy to an ensemble with an ultra-plush, million-dollar tone. It has to be a tasteful Rolls, moreover, not some cream-colored, two-toned number, and one in perfect condition and utterly reliable even after 45 years on the road.

Still, the day comes when the garage calls. The Guarneri, formed by young men at the 1964 Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont and by now the subject of books and films, has embarked on its last season.

Last month, the Guarneri opened the Coleman Concerts at Caltech with a pair of late Beethoven quartets. The series was formed in 1904, so that might have been one way for a venerable ensemble to feel young. But for its appearance Wednesday night at the Samueli Theater of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, the quartet actually embraced youth.

As part of its farewell, the Guarneri is touring with far younger colleagues, the members of the Johannes String Quartet. Each ensemble programmed a new work written for it. William Bolcom was commissioned to write an octet for all the players, who also come together for Mendelssohn's Octet.

Sadly, tragedy struck Tuesday. The brother of Johannes violist Choong-Jin Chang died unexpectedly, and Chang flew immediately to South Korea. A substitute violist, Leslie Robertson of the St. Lawrence Quartet, filled in for the Mendelssohn. But the West Coast premiere of Esa-Pekka Salonen's "Homunculus," for which OCPAC was a commissioner, had to be scrapped, as did Bolcom's Octet: Double Quartet. The Guarneri was still able to give the West Coast premiere of Derek Bermel's "Passing Through," and it pulled Dvorak's "American" Quartet out of its very large repertory hat to fill out the program.

"Passing Through" is a curious reverie. Bermel, born in 1967, three years after the Guarneri was formed, said in the program note that he composed his brief (just over six minutes) quartet last year at New York's Copland House, Aaron Copland's longtime residence. He was surrounded by American music history, and his subject was a quartet that has played its own significant role in American music history. Endings are his beginnings. He passes, in this score, through the slow movement of Beethoven's last quartet, Opus 135.