Music / Dance Reviews : Kronos Quartet at the Wadsworth

Enlightened advocacy, not a search for masterpieces, is the life work of a major international chamber ensemble like the Kronos Quartet.

When the Kronos--which appeared at Wadsworth Theater in Westwood during the weekend--discovers musical treasure while searching for provocative repertory, that is a bonus. The quest, not the destination, is the point.

Happy questing continues to provide Kronos’ audiences with amusing fulfillment. Friday night, in a UCLA Center for the Arts event in the commodious Wadsworth, music by Paul Hindemith, Dumisani Maraire, Justinian Tamusuza, Hermeto Pascoal, Philip Glass, Peter Sculthorpe and Giya Kancheli kept ears and sensibilities well occupied.

Glass’ new Fifth Quartet, in its West Coast premiere, offered, beneath a surface of colorful glossiness, real complexities of rhythmic, harmonic and melodic activity. Pascoal’s brief but pithy “Marcando Tempo” fascinated with the density of its textures and their unraveling by the performers.

The canceled appearance by composer Pascoal and his ensemble--scheduled to play here with Kronos--due to “budgetary constraints” may have robbed this program of some of its zing. Still, the energy level of the quartet--David Harrington, John Sherba, Hank Dutt and Joan Jeanrenaud--hardly flagged, as it produced committed and gripping performances.

An old specialty had to satisfy the die-hard Kronos listeners. That was Sculthorpe’s dramatic Eighth Quartet, here given a hair-raising reading of immaculate profile.

Two recent specialties, works by Maraire and Tamusuza that appear on the ensemble’s recent “Pieces of Africa” recording, could not have been more pleasant. A revival of Hindemith’s parody, “The Overture to ‘The Flying Dutchman’ as Played at Sight by a Second-Rate Concert Orchestra at the Village Well at 7 O’clock in the Morning” served as a reminder of the composer’s lighter side.

Kancheli’s quarter-hour “Night Prayers,” in its West Coast premiere, seemed on first hearing to be the direct opposite of Hindemith’s compressed and happy humor: a sober, grim and mournful opus moving slowly toward a predictable but delayed conclusion.