MUSIC REVIEWS : Bartok Quartet Welcoming at Doheny

Continuing what has proven a particularly rich month locally for chamber music, with appearances by the Tokyo, Talich, Sine Nomine and Juilliard quartets, the Bartok Quartet of Budapest regaled its audience in the welcoming, intimate confines of the Doheny Mansion on Friday with playing of unremitting communicative intensity and warmth.

What the Bartoks say, they tend to say boldly. Thus, Haydn’s “Emperor” Quartet projected a peasant vigor and, in the celebrated slow movement, rich individual sonorities and a play of light and shade far removed from the impersonal, reined-in style of presentation once regarded as ideal for music of the Classical era.

With Haydn, the quartet also approached the maximum number of intonational slips permitted within a single work. But, somehow, technical disorder is more than usually tolerable within the context of the energy and humanity of these artists’ interpretations.

Characteristically, in the infinitely sad and fiercely propulsive measures that alternate so strikingly in the Second Quartet of namesake composer Bela Bartok, the veteran ensemble--violinists Peter Komlos and Geza Hargitai, violist Geza Nemeth and cellist Laszlo Mezo--offered the kind of finely detailed, acutely balanced reading expected in a Haydn quartet, but with the darkly grand sonorities and subtle dramatic suspensions appropriate to Bartok’s specific world.

Finally, the exquisite A-flat Quartet of Dvorak exhibited the members of the Bartok Quartet as impassioned singers, projecting the lyric arches and bolts of folksy energy with equal aplomb and enthusiasm.

Tonight, under Los Angeles Philharmonic sponsorship, the Bartoks present a different program at University Synagogue in Brentwood. By all means, catch it.