MUSIC REVIEW : New World String Quartet at Ebell

The virtues of clarity and interpretive restraint were convincingly expounded during the concert presented by the New World String Quartet on Wednesday at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre.

Their compact, congruent, seductively low-key program offered apt, unexpectedly comforting counterpoint to the shattering events taking place in the Middle East.

Repertory clockbusters were absent; rather, three appealing, unhackneyed works, projected with an array of sophisticated skills by the Harvard University quartet-in-residence, violinists Curtis Macomber and Vahn Armstrong, violist Benjamin Simon and cellist Russ Harbaugh.

Prokofiev’s B-minor Quartet was by turns propulsively agitated and sweetly melancholy in an alert, warm-toned reading, while Hugo Wolf’s quicksilver “Italian Serenade” unfolded in such a cannily plotted dynamic scheme that for once the measures subsequent to its pre-midpoint climax did not seem superfluous.

In Brahms’ underexposed, untroubled and delicately balanced F-major String Quintet, the New World players, with the estimable assistance of violist Donald McInnes, concentrated on lightness of tone, easygoing but animated rhythms and optimally clear exposition of the tricky part-writing.

The resulting interpretation was an exemplar of the ordered Classicism Brahms continually touted but rarely practiced to the degree present in this captivating score.

On any other night, the Music Guild patrons would have demanded and received their quota of encores. As it was, their appreciation proved vociferous but brief, to the obvious relief of the artists who, like their audience, must have been anxious for news of how much our world had changed during the brief time they were regaling us with the treasures, rather than the terrors, of civilization.