Gardner's Quartet No. 5 is heard at Temple Beth Am Published: Tuesday, January 22, 2002 By James Roos roos@herald.com When you think of someone who began composing at age 6, was performing string quartets at 12, has a catalogue of more than 600 works and has been the subject of doctoral dissertations, you think of Mozart. But you could also be talking about Maurice Gardner, the American composer who for 30 years has created darkly vivid works -- including the five string quartets being championed by young American groups like the Pacifica Quartet, which played the first local performance of Gardner's Quartet No. 5, Cantus Hungaricus, Sunday afternoon at Miami's Temple Beth Am. Gardner, who will celebrate his 93rd birthday Feb. 16, has lived in the same Miami Beach condo with his wife, Sadie, 92, since moving here in 1970, following a lucrative career in New York writing music for films, TV and for the likes of Danny Kaye and Victor Borge. But when he settled here he didn't retire from composing. Instead, he launched a new career writing serious music for the concert stage and the result has been a remarkable Indian summer of creativity. In addition to the string quartets, there have been suites for duo-pianists, piano quintets, a concerto for string quartet and orchestra, a work for baritone and orchestra, and, most recently his first symphony, dubbed Symphony92, because it was composed last season in his 92nd year. The quartets, also created for the MirÛ and Miami String Quartets, earned Gardner a Lincoln Center premiere a few seasons ago, and his music for viola -- including a wealth of concertos and sonatas -- has endeared him to violists worldwide. The Fifth Quartet of 1998, is a virtuosic tour-de-force created explicitly for the Pacifica four - Simin Ganatra and Sibbi Berhardsson, violins; Masumi Per Rostand, viola, and Brandon Vamos, cello. It mines the Eastern European melodic vein that streaks through Gardner's output, but does so more richly than ever. Gardner says his mother familiarized him with many Magyar folk tunes, that he doted on the thrusting accents and dotted rhythms of Hungarian and Roumanian music, and echoes of Bartok and Kodaly invariably lurk somewhere in the background. The Fifth Quartet, however, distills them in Gardner's own peculiarly earnest yet mercurial style. A four-note theme dominating the piece undergoes transfornmations in extremely brilliant, athletic string writing full of pungent, abrasive harmonies, sometimes skittery bowings and loud-soft contrasts. The music runs from muted counterpoint through evocations of the gypsy cimbalom to a bustling, surging climax that has the four players repeating the emphatic, tangy four-note theme through a maze of Maygar reminiscences. Here Gardner comes closest to recalling Kodaly. Still, from urgent first note to last, it's vintage Gardner -- remarkably fresh and youthful, which is why young groups like the Pacifica enjoy his music. The Pacifica, in fact, is an unusually perceptive, flexible foursome, in the line of the St. Lawrence Quartet, and while it doesn't yet extract the last ounce of gypsy flavor from Gardner's Fifth, it did an incisive job. The Op. 13 Mendelssohn wrote at 18 was also done superbly. It ends in the melodious mood of the ineffable Octet, yet has more elusive, complex moments inspired by Mendelssohn's study of Beethoven's late quartets. Beethoven's Razumovsky, Op. 59, No. 1, was also extremely well done, the Pacifica capturing the mellow mood but also the exuberance of the boisterous Russian finale. The supple, effortless pointing of phrases by the first violin was a special pleasure, also the bold definition of Rostad's viola.