Cuarteto Latinoamericano Keeps It Moving

The Cuarteto Latinoamericano ran a marathon in Los Angeles during its Da Camera Society residency over the past week, which from all indications seems to be business as usual for this hardy foursome. With an overflowing slate of community outreach concerts--including performances in two subway stations--to go with its main concert at the newly restored Pico House near Olvera Street on Friday night, that works out to 10 concerts in three days. If there was any collective exhaustion, it didn’t show Friday.

One can always expect creative, against-the-grain programming from these prophets, who long ago anticipated--and helped set off--the current boom in Latin American classical music. They championed the music of Silvestre Revueltas well before he became a cult hero, and though the jagged edges might be a bit smoother now, they still rip into his Quartet No. 4 (“Music of the Fair”) with plenty of cohesive energy and nerve-shredding acid humor.

As a sample of the Villa-Lobos quartet cycle that it is currently finishing for the Dorian label, the Cuarteto offered the least typical entry, the Quartet No. 1, a six-movement suite (all the other 16 quartets have four movements) whose mood swings between folk-like dances and Romantic lyricism remind one of Dvorak’s “Dumky” Trio. In its different way, Joaquin Turina’s “La Oracion del Torero” also emphasized mood swings--lyrical prayer versus the rumbling Andalusian scales of the bull ring.

While a Latin jazz connection--in name, if not in fact--linked “Wapango” by jazz saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera with Arturo Marquez’s “Homenaje a Gismonti,” the Marquez soon disengaged itself with a fierce momentum miles away from D’Rivera’s geniality. Jose Evangelista’s “Spanish Garland” took us back to folk-influenced drones and rhythms dating from the Moors; one dance sounded almost like a Scottish reel. And they had fun with the whiplash portamentos of Astor Piazzolla’s atypically unsentimental “Four, for Tango”--which turned out to be the most radical-sounding piece on the program.

For an encore, the Cuarteto pursued the madcap dissonances of Roberto Sierra’s “Mambo 7/16,” where underneath the off-kilter rhythms you can just perceive the outlines of a mambo.