Wonderland Ballroom, Hawthorn

THERE are days when you’d like to shrink the Town Hall. A day after the heady delights of the Lloyd family’s little 200-seater down at the Coriole Music Festival, the seemingly vast open spaces of the 900-seat auditorium on King William St rather swallowed the visiting Jerusalem Quartet, playing for Musica Viva on May 3.

Some great Russian Quartets of the past have sounded massive almost anywhere: these Russians – still very youthful – opted for a rare delicacy and a soft but lustrous tone. On this occasion at least, the result was a disappointing first half, given the Jerusalem’s high international reputation.

The program began with two “firsts” by their respective composers. Shostakovich’s String Quartet in C major, written in 1938, was quite lacking in acerbity, and there were passages that might have been mistaken for English pastorale, while the Third of the great Viennese composer’s group of Six Quartets op 18 – and the first in order of composition – came across as Beethoven-Lite. After the interval, matters improved. Rakmaninov’s unfinished, one-movement Quartet, dating from 1889, gave the players a chance to show off their famed legato, and by the second Shostakovich quartet of the evening – his No 4 – they were clearly back on form. Not perhaps the kind of performance that sweeps away lingering doubt that for all the composer’s fraught relations with the Soviet regime, it was nonetheless the Cold War that contributed mightily to his reputation – but it certainly confirmed the Jerusalem’s reputation as one of the more promising young quartets of the day.

The Australian String Quartet, back at the Town Hall on May 24, run the risk these days of being taken for granted: dependable, sometimes perhaps a mite stolid and, in recent months, a seemingly ubiquitous fixture in the Adelaide concert calendar. Just how wrong such assumptions can be was vividly demonstrated in this concert. In great shape from a major interstate tour that took them from Queensland to Melbourne, the audience-reaching confidence of their playing delivered an evening of good to superlative performances. It ended with a playing of Dvorak’s American Quartet that was as fragrant as you could wish – and greatly relished by the audience – and included in the shape of Toru Takemitsu’s A Way Alone, a piece of rather new (20 years-old) music delivered with a degree of pananche that made you long for a second hearing. But the evening’s highlight was the Shostakovich 7th Quartet in a performance that had all the inner tension and musical electricity that had eluded the Jerusalem players earlier in the month.

The ASQ returns to the Town Hall at the end of July, playing Mozart, Dvorak and Beethoven. On this form, you would be crazy to miss them.