Penderecki Quartet Makes the Difficult Seem Easy

Exaggeration for effect is not the Penderecki String Quartet’s style. Communication is. Clarity is. In an uncompromisingly serious program for the latest Monday Evening Concert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the group played with such perfect poise and careful acuity that a listener could lock onto the music like a heat-seeking missile, as though there were no performer middlemen.

The program featured five difficult string quartets that could throw obstacles in a listener’s way under other circumstances. Here, works by Aleksander Lason, Toshio Hosokawa, Kurtag, Bartok and Penderecki spoke with an energized directness and seemed as clear as drawings.

The 1987 String Quartet No. 2 of Silesian composer Lason proved a wonderfully freewheeling thing, a kind of follow the leader and crack the whip game all at once, in which the individual musicians chase and echo one another, gain momentum, and release.

Hosokawa’s 1992 Landscape No. 1 inhabits an open plain where little things take on significance. Soft, sustained notes expire into silence; bouncing bows rattle like gravel; edgy chords penetrate like a cold fog.

Kurtag’s 18-minute, 15-movement “Officium breve in memoriam Andreae Szervanszky” is a typically spare and intense statement from this composer. Its musical shapes are shard-like, silhouetted against a blank background. These sharp utterances--quiet and violent--exist in the world halfway between Bartok’s night music and Webern’s shadows.

Bartok’s Third Quartet emerged with all its intricacies and terseness tightly wound, its technical difficulties nonexistent for these players, but its musical strain intact. The volatile sound experiments of Penderecki’s String Quartet No. 2 were beautifully dovetailed in the group’s performance. The piece emerged as stream-of-consciousness in the extreme, an improvisatory whirlwind. It put an exclamation point on the end of a concentrated, rigorous and satisfying event.