Dance and Music Reviews : Angeles Quartet Plays Schoenberg at College

Arnold Schoenberg developed by leaps and bounds, but just how far forward he would vault could scarcely have been predicted from the early work played Friday by the Angeles Quartet at Los Angeles Harbor College in Wilmington.

In 1897, two years before he ventured into the lush ultra-Romantic savanna of “Verklarte Nacht,” Schoenberg dallied amid Bohemian woods and meadows in the String Quartet in D.

The Quartet--violinists Kathleen Lenski and Roger Wilkie, violist Brian Dembow and cellist Stephen Erdody--deftly drew the composer’s debts to Dvorak for open sonorities and folklike themes and to Brahms for structure and methods of development.

They also skillfully traced the composer’s adventurous chromaticism in the third movement--kept in control by passacaglialike variations. They were most compelling, however, in the wistful delicacy of the muted second movement.

Schoenberg’s work would prove the most congenial on the program.

Appearing as a guest with the quartet was pianist Mona Golabek. (The quartet reciprocated by appearing as guests on Golabek’s UCLA series Saturday night.)

The string players’ propensity toward lean tone and the ensemble’s straightforward, uninflected phrasing were less than ideally suited to the expansive drama of Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat.

The players were robust, energetic and accurate, but they provided few moments of eloquence, sweetness or blossoming.