MUSIC REVIEW : Angeles Quartet at the Ford

This has not been a summer of great repertory adventures in the Nakamichi Chamber Concerts at the Ford Amphitheatre. In context, modest twists count for much.

Monday, it was the turn of the local heroes of the Angeles String Quartet, who brought us the young Samuel Barber’s Opus 11. The Adagio is certainly much with us, particularly in its incarnation for string orchestra, but the whole work is relatively and regrettably rare.

The Angeles players gave the wrap-around outer movement a nervous edge--not inappropriate interpretively, but their scrambled opening did little to suggest that the jitters were calculated.

In the celebrated Adagio, the ensemble glowed, collectively and individually. The Angeles Quartet is one of the most equitably voiced groups, and violinists Kathleen Lenski and Roger Wilkie, violist Brian Dembow and cellist Stephen Erdody created a supple texture from which each could easily emerge with characterful solos.

Softly intense, lyrically poignant slow movements proved a connecting thread. The Angelenos located the center of their burnished attentions to Dvorak’s “American” Quartet, Opus 96, in the Lento, weaving another balanced, evenly colored fabric, although with a bit too much viola at the end.

Dembow’s strong playing was one of the glories of the opening movement, however, launching a unified and animated reading of the whole piece. There was rhythmic punch and stylish verve aplenty in the Scherzo and finale, lacking only an assertive presence from the sweet-toned fiddle of Lenski, which seemed gradually to fade from the foreground throughout the evening.

If the Barber demonstrated the survival of the Romantic impulse beyond the 19th Century, Mozart could prefigure it. That at least appeared to be the Angeles approach in a soft-grained performance of the D-minor Quartet, K. 421, with the upwardly aspiring song of the Andante the emotional fulcrum of the interpretation. Here Lenski supplied ample leadership, slender in sound but lithe and elegant in spirit.