Hugo Wolf Quartet Offers Insights and Entertainment

Prodigiously talented and provocatively thoughtful ensembles seem to multiply through some kind of spontaneous generation, and the great boom in chamber music has long since passed from heartening to downright amazing. The Hugo Wolf Quartet, a multi-award winner from Vienna, made its West Coast debut Sunday evening at the Skirball Cultural Center and immediately laid claim to a prominent place on anyone’s must-hear list.

The canny, tour de force program was designed as a complement to the Skirball’s current Freud exhibit, and as cultural context it certainly had emphatic points. But it was also welcome as an isolated musical agenda, taut, invigorating performances of Berg’s Lyric Suite not coming our way every day. No historical curiosity this, but a vital masterpiece brimming with revolutionary ideas about instrumental color and texture, to say nothing of old-fashioned virtues such as killer tunes.

Violinists Jehi Bahk and Regis Bringolf, violist Waldimir Kossianenko and cellist Florian Berner--who take their name from the famous Austrian composer--play without fear. Urgent and impassioned, yes, but with an absolute commitment to the ideal values of every note. Their personalities are clearly defined yet well-meshed, with no technical weakness anywhere.

The wonders of Berg’s polyphonic developments seemed perfectly suited to this intense union of powerful individuals, but then so did the more febrile strands of Webern’s one-movement String Quartet from 1905. That became a major display of harmonic chiaroscuro in the Wolfs’ persuasive hands, its importance compromised only by uncharacteristic--for Webern--verbosity.

As a reminder of the trenchant Webern that would be, the ensemble offered the second of his Five Movements for String Quartet as its quietly gleaming encore.

All this and magnificently surging Brahms too. The Wolfs gave as richly rhapsodic yet firmly argued an account of the C minor Quartet, Opus 51, No. 1, as could be desired, while revealing connecting links of sentiment and sonority among all three composers. Instructive as well as inspiring, and definitely entertaining: It hardly seems fair.