Music and Dance Reviews : Ridge String Quartet at L.A. County Art Museum

On Thursday, in one of those occasional Bing Concerts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art not devoted to the contemporary muse, a notably accomplished young American ensemble, the Ridge String Quartet, presented a program that looked old-hat on paper: Haydn, Bartok, Dvorak.

But by bracketing the last completed quartet of Haydn, his rarely heard work in F, Opus 77, No. 2, and Bartok, his Sixth, a powerful point was made.

While the Haydn is swaggering, secure, insistently affirmative, the Bartok is a catalogue of paradoxes and contrasts in emotion and sonority, ending, as it began, in hopeless longing, in unfulfillment.

The Ridge members--violinists Krista Bennion Feeney and Robert Rinehart, violist Ah Ling Neu and cellist Charles Curtis--played both works energetically, with admirable ensemble balance, clarity of line and focused, handsome tone.

If their full-blown approach to Haydn--replete with wide dynamic range and nonstop vibrato-- seemed rather on the grand side, vigor and pinpoint accuracy were overriding elements in its favor.

Dvorak’s “American” Quartet, which rounded out the program, began unpromisingly, with an allegro movement fragmented by the first violinist’s dynamic fussing and stop-and-go tempo. But the interpretation acquired momentum, strength and shape as it progressed, culminating in a finale of propulsive abandon.