A high-voltage accord with the unorthodox

Members of Ethel (from left): Ralph Farris, Mary Rowell, Dorothy Lawson, and Cornelius Dufallo. (Leslie Lyons)

In their performance Friday in Sanders Theatre, the string quartet known as Ethel did just about everything a conventional string quartet would never do. They wore hot outfits, not tails. They talked a lot (mostly about how great the audience was and what a beautiful hall Sanders is and, of course, the Red Sox). When the bow of the violist frayed, he let the strands hang there, like a rocker's broken string, an emblem of passion. They grimaced coolly at the audience and tossed their abundant hair. And they played their instruments with heavy amplification. They call it "sound design."

Explaining that fact between numbers, violinist Mary Rowell remarked to the audience, with a half-hearted shrug, "You have to keep up with the times." Who says so? Not Sir Roger Norrington. Or Sting, who has been singing Dowland ballads. Or Aretha, who just stays firmly herself. Now, there might be a good artistic reason for amplification, but the effect on these stringed instruments - shaped over centuries to allow infinitely subtle textures and a full array of overtones - is to narrow their sound to a sharp metallic whine.

"Heavy metal for strings"? That is how Ethel's members like to describe what they are about. Actually, however, their music is more complex and interesting, and less provocative, than the phrase suggests. These four Juilliard School graduates, who joined forces 10 years ago (with one substitution since), avoid the standard European quartets in favor of new music, much of it commissioned or inspired by them, and often drawing on other cultures (Finnish, Brazilian, Native American, tango, and blues) with soupçons of European masters (Brahms's sextets in the Brazilian Marcelo Zarvos' "Arrival"). Rowell contributed a fascinating version of jazz pianist Lennie Tristano's "Requiem," a combination of New Orleans funeral procession and keening blues. Julia Wolfe's "Early That Summer" is a daring piece of clashing sonorities and shifting harmonies (and owing something to Beethoven's late quartets). Unfortunately, it came at the end of the program, when one was tired.

With some blessed exceptions, it was curious how much of the music fell into a pattern: repetitive motoric figures, mostly of broken chords played on open strings, with climaxes arriving through thickening textures and rising volume, not harmonic tension and resolution. In only a few pieces (Phil Kline's "The Blue Room" was one), melody came to the fore in a solo voice; melody, which speaks for the individual's experience in the madding crowd; melody, which the violin can express more beautifully than any other instrument, except possibly the human voice. There is much new music yet to be written for strings. What lasts will love them for what they are, and not try to make them into anything they are not.