Excerpted from https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/05/arts/music-the-juilliard-quartet.html

NOT too many ensembles with established reputations would devote the better half of a concert to a lengthy new piece by a young composer. But this is just what the Juilliard String Quartet did Wednesday night when it played the String Quartet No. 1 by Christopher James at the Juilliard Theater.

The gamble paid off. Mr. James’s quartet, over a half-hour in length and leisurely in its ruminations, is an attractive and substantial work. It is most persuasive when most rhapsodic, less so when Mr. James lapses into fughettas and other ”workings-out” of his material, which struck this listener as rather academic. Moreover, the quartet, for all of its felicities, is simply too long. But one admired Mr. James’s use of chromaticism, which seemed both yearning and temperate, his sense of the epic and his idiomatic writing for strings. The Juilliard Quartet played with tenderness and commitment.

The program also included an elegant and incisive performance of Mozart’s String Quartet in C (K. 465, ”Dissonant”) and Milton Babbitt’s String Quartet No. 4. The latter is a series of shimmering, disembodied crescendos, determinedly non-narrative, beyond angst and joy.

A version of this article appears in print on April 5, 1987, Section 1, Page 62 of the National edition with the headline: MUSIC: THE JUILLIARD QUARTET. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe