MUSIC REVIEW : Arditti Quartet at Bing Theater

Appearances, the Arditti String Quartet reminded us Monday evening, can be deceiving. The British ensemble, playing in shirt-sleeves, looked callow, casual and disinterested.

Their playing, though, proved deeply involved and involving. The four--Irvine Arditti and David Alberman, violins; Levine Andrade, viola; Rohan de Saram, cello--could sound coarse at times, but never uncommitted. They are paradoxically businesslike about risk-taking; they know what their music demands and proceed to supply it, whatever it takes.

The Arditti Quartet does not play music for milquetoasts, at least not for the Monday Evening Concerts audience. The Bing Theater program, one of the contributions to the UK/LA ’88 Festival by the County Museum of Art, would be scratched from the start in any accessibility stakes. Post-modernists need not apply.

The concert began its equally exhausting and rewarding course on the relatively friendly terms of Gyorgy Kurtag’s 12 Mikroludiums. These attractive, atmospheric miniatures make a perilous warm-up, however, and the Arditti performance sounded thin and scratchy at first.

At the end of the program--there was nothing so entertainment-oriented as an encore, despite sustained applause and even an embryonic standing ovation from the assembled aficionados--lay Xenakis’ “Tetras.” This utterly characteristic architectural essay in texture and mass was written for the Arditti Quartet, and complete familiarity and effective attention was audible in every vigorous glissando and ponticello buzz.

Xenakis’ heavy unison rasps drew some initial chuckles, a la Spike Jones, but the intensity and sheer bravura of the Arditti account changed humor into stunned admiration. This was a performance of clean, sculpted edges, burnished sound and artful balance.

In between Kurtag and Xenakis came three knotty, atonal quartets, demonstrating that composers as diverse as Carter, Ligeti and Brian Ferneyhough can have much in common, at least when played by the Arditti Quartet.

Ferneyhough’s Third Quartet, premiered by the Arditti last October, consists of two diffuse, complex movements. The contrasts between them were much more vivid in the composer’s program note than in the performance, perhaps because the players do not do as well for soft sustained passages as they do for gritty frenzy.

Ligeti’s Second Quartet divides into five, more traditionally identifiable movements. His language, though, is as precise and querulously dissonant as Ferneyhough’s, and the Arditti rendition lacked nothing in stern clarity.

The British ensemble is recording all four of Carter’s quartets for release later this year. From their gruffly affectionate reading of the wry, philosophical Fourth, that is a project to anticipate with interest.