MUSIC REVIEW : Efficient Outing From Marlboro Group at Bing Theater

Despite the skills of its individual members and the cohesiveness of their joint effort, workaday efficiency marked much of the playing of the traveling Musicians From Marlboro ensemble that appeared on Wednesday at the Bing Theater of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Violinists Todd Phillips and Mark Steinberg, violist Steven Tenenbom and cellist Marcy Rosen created a semblance of a seasoned string quartet in Haydn’s Quartet in E flat, Opus 50, No. 3 (more interesting for its harmonic inventiveness than for any particular thematic distinction) and the beuilingly fresh and folksy Quintet in G, Opus 77, of Dvorak, in which they were joined by bassist Peter Lloyd.

Both were delivered with energy and shapeliness, but also with a loudly aggressive sameness that failed to project the vast stylistic differences between the two. Dynamic subtlety was a marked presence only in the ecstatic Dvorak slow movement.

The Schoenberg Trio, Opus 45, hard work for the relatively few players brave enough to take up its esoteric cause, proved far more involving.

In the expert hands of Steinberg, an exciting new talent, and the veteran, hugely savvy Tenenbom and Rosen, Schoenberg’s half- century-old finger-buster showed that it still had the power to thrill and astonish with its frenzied intensity, its shatteringly tense pauses and gnarled lyricism.