Angeles’ Grace Illuminates Haydn

The Angeles Quartet knows a thing or two about Haydn, having worked on the mammoth enterprise of recording the complete Haydn quartets over the last few years. Fittingly enough, the group closed its residency at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wednesday with Haydn’s Quartet in C, Opus 76, No. 3, “Kaiser.” It can accurately be deemed anthemic, its famous, tuneful second movement having turned into the Austrian national anthem.

The quartet members--violinists Kathleen Lenski and Sara Parkins, violist Brian Dembow and cellist Stephen Erdody--play well together, conferring cohesion and something deeper on the music. They also have the gift of crisp understatement, a classical mind-frame.

That impression was confirmed in their reading of Beethoven’s Quartet, Opus 14, No. 1, the composer’s transcription of a piano sonata that plays beautifully, voiced for four strings. Written in his youth, this was Beethoven before the storm, and Romanticism’s birth. The work’s classical character is not far removed from Haydn’s own quartet-writing paradigms. The Angeles was at the ready, bringing a lightness and care to the score.

For the sake of diversity, they leaped to this century, and close to home, pulling out the second quartet of celebrated film composer Miklos Rosza. For all its strengths--drive, intelligence and a post-Bartok-ian gusto--there is a kind of “movie music” air to parts of the piece, a deliberateness to its devices. It plays like the handiwork of a gifted composer who spent more time attending to the demands of the screen than the concert stage.

That, however, didn’t stop the group’s members from giving a spirited reading. They captured the emotional fragility of the slow movement, with its ethereal high harmonic melodies, and the jaunty comic relief of the third movement.

As the “Kaiser” quartet arrived after intermission, the group was in its element. It delved into the work’s wit and grace, from its stately variations on a theme, right through to the paradoxical rush of the finale, with surging, anxious energy kicking just below the tidy surface.

In a real sense, the Angeles has a homestead in this formidable terrain. The Haydn quartets amount to a rich world, the Angeles Quartet is doing its share to uncover all its nooks and crannies.