MUSIC REVIEW : Reverberant Fare From the Arditti String Quartet

The Ahmanson Atrium at the L.A. County Museum of Art, a three-story high chimney of a space, lined with hard, polished surfaces, would be a perilous venue for many musical situations.

But the natural reverberation enhanced an evening of sonic explorations when the Arditti String Quartet arrived here Monday for a performance sponsored by the Independent Composers Assn.

The Arditti--violinists Irvine Arditti and David Alberman, violist Garth Knox and cellist Rohan de Saram--is recognized as that other string quartet on the scene specializing in contemporary music. Unlike the Kronos, its art is of a more sit-down, upright variety, less involved with trendy variants or crossover dreaming than with serious investigations of sonorities within the medium.

If not easy listening, its latest concert here made for highly rewarding listening.

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The opening work, Schnittke’s “Kanon in Memoriam Igor Stravinsky,” involves a haunting, spacious canon effect. Long tones, passed around the group, punctuated by silences, create tense, undulant chords that floated up into the space. Russian composer Sophia Gubaidulina’s mystical String Quartet No. 2 expands on a one-note theme, contrasting fully articulated pitches and the ghostly presence of harmonics or chromatic flitting around the droning tonic.

Further sonic experimentation came in the program closer, Gyorgy Ligeti’s fascinating String Quartet No. 2. Signature Ligeti effects are plentiful here--soft swarming clusters and jarring tumults, and, to finish, a fleeting wistfulness.

ICA composers Burt Goldstein and Donald B. Davis were well-represented, respectively, by the “Aspen Quartet” and “Bleeding Particles.” Goldstein’s work has an implied rhythmic drive, with arpeggios laid out at an angle to a grid, while Davis’ piece “bled” by virtue of swelling, gliding notes mixed in with Bartokian thorny thickets.

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The concert’s apex came with the L.A. premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s Three Movements, a vivid and impulsive canvas, full of erratic sonic brush strokes with their own private logic.

Ephemeral by nature, the piece gives the listener the impression of having landed in the midst of a heated--yet fundamentally absurd--discussion.

The Arditti delivered, with rigor and beauty of a deep, unsentimental kind.