Concert note.(Brief Article)

The Guarneri String Quartet, at Carnegie Hall, New York.

The best way to hear chamber music, someone said many years ago, is through the feet. By which he meant that, optimally, one should be so close to the players that the cello's vibrations--and even sympathetic ones from the other strings--would communicate from the floor as well as the air. Today chamber music, alas, is rarely encountered through the feet, which may or may not have led to its relative obscurity vis-a-vis the other musical performing arts, but which certainly has led to a change in aesthetic appreciation.

There are other factors as well. In the days of the Flonzaley, or even the Budapest, Quartet, the audiences would be largely made up of those who had at least attempted the works being played, had studied the scores, and had, when new works entered the canon--notably Bartok's six--a genuine interest in at least giving them a run-through. Quartet playing, of course, still exists as a diversion, discipline, or relaxation for many--the violon d'Ingres is hardly unstrung--but it is today a sidelight rather than a centrality. It is probable that most of those in the audience for today's chamber music recitals have never played through a Haydn--much less a Bartok--quartet.

And yet the quartet recital has refused to go out of fashion, and despite the groans from classical music critics this brazenly elitist form of musical expression is currently enjoying a resurgent popularity not only in New York but across the United States. String quartets are in residence at several universities and conservatories, and new ones are formed almost yearly. The recent Shostakovich cycle by the Emerson Quartet, at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, played to an enthusiastic audience; next season will see a traversal of the six Bartoks in one (long) afternoon.

Quartets come and go and change personnel, but one mark of the form is the longevity of its exemplars--in the past, the Budapest; more recently, the Tokyo, the Juilliard, and the Guarneri. The last, since its inception in 1964, has arrogated a place to itself as the Cadillac of the field, in all senses of that term. The Guarneri Quartet has almost become an industry in itself, spawning at least three books (one by its first violinist, Arnold Steinhardt), one documentary, and, of course, a plethora of recordings. It regularly receives plaudits from the critics; the major knock on the group has been that the machinery is almost too fine-tuned, at the expense of emotional depth--a whiff of Virgil Thomson's categorization of Heifetz's violin playing as "silk-underwear music."

The Guarneri has achieved a consistency and continuity because its personnel has never changed--certainly a longevity record--but its concert May 9 at Carnegie Hall signaled a first: the cellist, David Soyer, in his late seventies, is retiring in favor of Peter Wiley, and the second and final piece on the program was chosen to showcase the two: Schubert's c Major Quintet, D. 956.

A capacity audience of Guarneri devotees assembled for this farewell, and a commemorative book of informal photographs was included with the program. Acclaim, tribute, and love were ...