Music Reviews : Orford Quartet at Schoenberg Hall

When Canada’s Orford String Quartet last visited these parts a couple of seasons ago, the group was undergoing a painful period of adjustment, endeavoring to create a new personality with two new members, violist Sophie Renshaw and cellist Desmond Hoebig, who had recently joined founding violinists Andrew Dawes and Kenneth Perkins. Their ensemble then proved tentative, even rough.

Two additional years together have paid stunning dividends: Today’s Orford Quartet is among the chamber music elite, an ensemble that plays with vitality, optimum technical command and probing intelligence, as evidenced in an engrossing concert Sunday at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall.

Their execution of Mozart’s sublime last quartet, in F, K. 590, was marked by aristocratic grandeur and astonishing finesse: a reading consistently alive to the suggestion that important things were being said, but in Mozart’s most contained, even aloof manner.

The single-movement Fifth Quartet (1989) by the man Canadians tend to regard as their most important living composer, 57-year-old R. Murray Schafer, proved both accessible and compelling in Sunday’s local premiere by its dedicatees.

It is difficult on first hearing to vouch for the work’s substance, but it impressed at the very least over a largely reflective, even melancholy 19-minute span (the calm shattered midway by Bartokian ostinatos) with the composer’s sensitive manipulation of string textures and natural gift for dramatic contrast. The final measures, marked by the combination of violin harmonics and the dulcet, outer-spacey whine of bowed crotales (small suspended cymbals), convey strikingly original timbres. One hopes for a reprise of this attractive work--and a sampling of Schafer’s other quartets--when the Orfords return.

The program concluded with Beethoven’s last quartet, Opus 135, in which the players found and projected as much wit and lyric grace as drama to create a mobile, richly satisfying interpretation.