Music Reviews : Arditti Premieres Cohn’s ‘Eye of Chaos’

It would be difficult to overstate the excellence of the Arditti String Quartet. If the group regularly performed standard repertory, it would be numbered among the world’s most elite ensembles. If its members donned avant-garde apparel, paid more attention to their hair or played pop encores, they could command the large, fashionable audience of the Kronos Quartet.

The Arditti does none of these things, of course, instead dedicating itself exclusively to no-nonsense, technically finished performances of new music. One listens to the music, not the Arditti.

A small but enthusiastic audience gathered for the London-based ensemble’s latest appearance Tuesday in Bovard Auditorium, USC. As per usual in its visits here, the quartet--Irvine Arditti, David Alberman, Garth Knox and Rohan de Saram--devoted part of its concert to California composers, offering authoritative readings of everything it played.

The evening’s premiere was the 13-minute quartet, “‘Eye of Chaos,” by Stephen Cohn, a film composer and Emmy winner. Being that it is inspired by principles of Chaos Theory, the work puzzlingly impresses through its orderliness.

Constructed in palindromic form, it states accessible, contrasting ideas--dance-like, songful, mostly tonal--moves them towards a center of high-tessitura lyricism, then unwinds them in reverse order to conclusion. On first listening, a friendly, engaging piece.

Another opportunity to hear Donald Crockett’s “Array,” premiered here two seasons ago by the Kronos, proved welcome as well.

Elliott Carter’s Fourth Quartet moves along in predictably nervous fashion, despite the composer’s straight-faced evocation of Haydn and Mozart in his program note. Still, the nimbleness of the Arditti’s account gave its twitching conversations an attractive laciness, like a Jackson Pollock painting made audible.

To conclude, the ensemble offered a poised, concentrated reading of Bartok’s Fifth Quartet.