Dance and Music Reviews : Ameling, Alexander Quartet at Royce Hall

Imaginative programming and artistry of the highest order marked Saturday’s concert in Royce Hall of UCLA by soprano Elly Ameling, pianist Rudolf Jansen and the Alexander String Quartet.

To start, the New York-based Alexanders--violinists Eric Pritchard and Frederick Lifsitz, violist Paul Yarborough, cellist Sandy Wilson--gave a daring, win-all performance of Haydn’s inexhaustibly inventive Quartet in C, Opus 76, No. 1. Fast tempos precluded neither linear clarity nor wit in the outer movements, a correspondingly slow pace for the moonstruck Andante worked to perfection since the players maintained a firm rhythmic spine, and in the Minuet’s trio section their flirtation with caricature rubato proved a gamble that paid handsome dividends.

Subsequently, Ameling commanded the stage with nine Brahms songs. Thirty years before the public has taken the expected toll on the Dutch soprano’s light, lyric instrument. The voice is no longer as firmly fixed as once it was, with flutteriness at the register break and lack of support above the staff. But the youthful timbre remains, while her artistry--predicated on making strong verbal points through the simplest expressive means--has, if anything, intensified.

In all nine songs, notably a fine-spun and touching “O wusst ich doch den Weg zuruck” and a heartbreaking “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer,” accompanist Jansen provided discreet, yet forceful, support.

After the Alexanders had neatly polished off Hugo Wolf’s “Italian Serenade,” the evening’s full complement offered a rare hearing of Faure’s song cycle “La bonne chanson” in a chamber arrangement not of the composer’s own devising and, in fact, repudiated by him.

Whatever its shortcomings relative to the harmonically more daring voice-piano original, it was ravishing in the expert, affectionate hands of Ameling, the Alexanders and Jansen, as was the single encore, an uncredited arrangement of Richard Strauss’ quietly rapturous “Morgen.”