MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : SEQUOIA AT JAPAN AMERICA THEATRE

The Sequoia String Quartet & Friends series at the Japan America Theatre has, in the half-dozen years of its existence, become a vital, sometimes unpredictable (part of its appeal) ingredient of Los Angeles musical life, playing to a dedicated, perceptive audience.

Typically, that audience arrived early for the latest Sequoia concert (a tribute in itself), its members familiar with one another, many of them in clusters on the plaza outside the theater, talking about music rather than the day’s stock market doings or the fate of Baby M. A Sequoia crowd.

Their reward Tuesday night was the sort of intelligent, lively and communicative music-making that has come to symbolize the Sequoia, whatever its personnel and in spite of occasional untidy ensemble.

Certainly, the program opener, Haydn’s Quartet in C, Opus 74, No. 1, had its tentative moments: In the opening movement first violinist Peter Marsh, rhythmically skittish and unable to project his tone out into the auditorium, forced his colleagues--second violinist Miwako Watanabe, violist James Dunham, cellist Bonnie Hampton--into a game of catch-up. But in the slow movement, one of Haydn’s lyric inspirations of such striking and unexpected beauty that it never fails to stun an audience into total silence, the Sequoians’ playing coalesced admirably.

The novelty of the evening was the 1927 Oboe Quintet of Sir Arthur Bliss, which is, in its outer movements, neither a particularly distinguished piece nor a grateful solo vehicle, being compounded of too many detached-note fragments and a feeling of thematic aimlessness.

In the slow movement, the composer manages to achieve some harmonic tension, but the big, Vaughan Williams-like tune, seemingly always just around the corner, never does make its appearance.

There can be little doubt that the work was heard under the best possible circumstances, the Sequoia strings complementing Allan Vogel’s plangent, virtuosic oboe with rich-toned, finely meshed sonorities.

Finally, Beethoven’s Quartet in F, Opus 59, No. 1, in a lively, intelligent conception, proved particularly satisfying in its middle sections, the scherzando second movement hurled out with darting energy, the adagio archingly, achingly songful, with Hampton’s agile, bright-toned cello serving as both anchor and driving force.