Guitar Quartet: More Daring, More Assured and Never Better

The world’s hottest classical ensemble or its tightest pop band? However it helps you to think about the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, keep the emphasis on superlatives for its unrivaled joy, technical elan and questing spirits. Now celebrating its 20th year and seemingly playing everywhere but L.A., the group returned home Thursday with an endlessly entertaining and enlivening survey program at Royce Hall.

Formed at USC of Romero proteges, LAGQ immediately set about expanding the dimensions of the medium, admittedly an almost inevitable task. Years of aggressive commissioning and arranging and one personnel change culminated in four Delos CDs in the early ‘90s.

Representing that period at Royce were William Kanengiser’s deft, evocative arrangement of Falla’s “El Amor Brujo” and a little Bach group arranged by Andrew York and Scott Tennant. The playing of the quartet--now Kanengiser, York, Tennant and John Dearman--is both more daring and more assured, confident of each other and their sonic resources. From the perfectly matched tonal shades of the fragile Bach prelude to the fierce outbursts of the Falla, these were magisterial demonstrations of musical prowess, and obviously as much fun for the players as for the audience.

In 1997 the group jumped to the fusion factory at Sony and has released two dizzyingly varied albums. Much of its current world-music-inspired repertory is reminiscent of the work of John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola and Paco de Lucia in its sophisticated riff-driven permutations and intensely collaborative zest.

LAGQ opened with nods to the first Sony disc, Kanengiser’s jangly, lilting “Mbira” and York’s gleefully striding “Djembe,” with percussionist Tim Timmermans. From the new recording were the complex rhythmic games of Carlos Rivera’s “Cumba-Quin”--with the composer present for a well-deserved bow--Tennant’s sprightly faux-ethnic “Celtic Faire,” York’s dark, insistent “(Ask the) Sphinx,” Paulo Bellinati’s Brazilian jazz “Baia~o de Gude,” and Kanengiser’s powerfully developed “Air & Ground.”

Along with new sounds (though this has never been a group of predictable repertory), LAGQ is sporting a new, Kronos Quartet-inspired look, with frequent and dramatic shifts in stage lighting. They have kept the aw-shucks introductions, however, and delighted the vociferous but modestly sized crowd with two encores.