Music : Lydian Quartet at Doheny Mansion

The Lydian String Quartet offered a curiously constructed concert for the Da Camera Society at the Doheny Mansion on Friday.

The ensemble, in residence at Brandeis University near Boston, began with Faure’s melancholy, recondite and rarely encountered swan song, his Quartet in E minor. It is worth hearing, especially in as involved and shapely a reading as the Lydian’s. But one questions the wisdom of starting an evening’s entertainment with music so undemonstrative and unlikely to yield up even a fraction of its secrets on first encounter.

The tension generated by the subsequent offering, a local premiere of the Third Quartet of American composer Lee Hyla (b. 1952), proved somewhat more involving.

Hyla’s single-movement work, commissioned by the Lydians last year, employs the medium cleverly, frequently dividing the foursome into competing pairs of instruments.

On a first hearing, never conclusive, one recognizes such Bartokian derivations as its long tremolos and slashing, sonorous unisons. What this listener did not recognize, however, was the composer’s announced use of a “rhythmic riff from ‘Fight the Power’ by the rap group Public Enemy.”

Finally, the Lydians treated the familiar strains of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet with respect and freshness of spirit. High marks to the ensemble--violinists Daniel Stepner and Judith Eissenberg, violist Mary Ruth Ray, cellist Rhonda Rider--particularly for presenting the theme-and-variations slow movement not as a series of fancy solo turns, but as a tautly integrated ensemble piece.