MUSIC REVIEW : Musicians From Marlboro

This year’s collection of Musicians From Marlboro, artists associated with the Vermont-based festival/academy, roared, sighed and sang its way through a richly satisfying program at Gindi Auditorium on Monday.

Their concert, presented under Los Angeles Philharmonic auspices, began with Mozart’s sublime E-flat Piano Quartet, projected with a startling, heartening combination of youthful vivacity and old-pro interpretive cunning.

The combined age of the ensemble, made up of pianist Wu Han, violinist Pamela Frank, violist Scott St. John and cellist Julia Lichten, may have hit ninety-five.

Equally striking was the subsequent offering: Prokofiev’s tough, fiery Sonata for Two Violins.

Frank and St. John, the latter swapping viola for violin, presented the knotty score with as much attention to its balletic grace (foretastes of the composer’s “Cinderella”) as its acid harmonies and ferocious rhythms.

Their big-toned reading proved a triumph not only of technical skill and dramatic intensity, but of iron-willed concentration in the face of stentorian competition from what sounded suspiciously like the infamous Mulholland Marathon Coughing Society.

As finale, we may not have needed yet another Schubert “Trout” Quintet--particularly one so respectful of the score’s repeats as the Marlboro players’. Nor need pianist Han have been so intent on exploring every possible dynamic and rhythmic nuance suggested by the slow movement’s simple tunes.

Still, the ensemble, with bassist Peter Lloyd the nimble fifth member, offered one of the more fresh, tasty and clean-lined servings of the elusive old fish within recent memory.