Music Reviews : Quadrivium Ensemble at County Art Museum

Despite its name, L’Ensemble Quadrivium is a home-grown musical enterprise, a local chamber group devoted to contemporary music which offered its debut Monday night at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The promise is there, if not yet the practiced sheen. At its best Quadrivium showed readily expressive music making combined with an intellectual bent, and at all times revealed the resources for future excellence. Listing 12 musicians in its permanent makeup, the group enrolled guest conductor Juan Felipe Orrego-Benavente for this event, in a program of Hanns Eisler and Erich Korngold, with some Schoenberg transcriptions.

It was in Mahler’s “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen”--in Schoenberg’s instrumentation for string quintet, woodwinds, piano, percussion and harp--that the musicians hit their stride, with baritone Edward Levy providing vibrant and pointed singing, supported by vigorous, rhythmically focused and sensitive accompaniments.

Busoni’s “Berceuse elegiaque,” also in a Schoenberg transcription--performed locally only two weeks ago by the Amsterdam Schoenberg Ensemble--emerged with similar expressive integrity, but lacked the plush texture this score requires for its effect.

The first half disappointed, partially in contrast to originally scheduled works by Schnittke, Takemitsu and Xenakis. Korngold’s Four Pieces from “Much Ado About Nothing” for violin and piano noodled along in agreeable if forgettable pseudo-salon, semi-sweet fashion, played by violinist Maria Newman and pianist Dolores Stevens. Eisler’s “Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu Beschreiben”--an atonal piece of neoclassical texture and counterpoint for mixed sextet--in absence of the film for which it was written, made its 15 minutes seem longer.

Two Strauss waltzes closed the program.