Angeles String Quartet Delivers Bracing Haydn

The Angeles String Quartet makes a move toward international prominence with the release next week of a 21-CD set of the complete Haydn string quartets on a major label (Philips). It’s an event because the complete Haydns aren’t recorded as often as one would think, and the set has already been widely praised in Europe.

The Haydn quartets occupy an ambivalent slot in our concert life; everyone acknowledges their importance and influence, but they are often treated casually as interchangeable warmup pieces. Thankfully there was nothing routine about the Angeles’ performance of the Quartet in D minor, Opus 76, No. 2 at LACMA’s Bing Theatre on Wednesday night--a vigorous, pointed, crisp conception with a furiously mean edge on the finale.

The other newsworthy aspect of the night was the revival of Paul Chihara’s fascinating “Sequoia,” composed in 1986 for the then-leading L.A.-area foursome, the Sequoia Quartet. It’s a clever, eclectic yet solidly fused single movement, freely juxtaposing atonality, attractive tunes, driving perpetual motion and echoes of Bartok and Shostakovich, suddenly turning inward toward the close with a passage of suspended, pitch-drifting, Zen-like stillness. In the latter section, the score calls for either a prerecorded tape or an alternative first-violin cadenza, but for this occasion, Chihara decided that both would be played simultaneously (the tape was barely audible).

Mendelssohn’s ever-affirmative String Quartet in D, Opus 44, No. 1 concluded the evening, dispatched with moderately quick tempos, a touch of scrappiness in the opening movement, yet plenty of heat down the stretch.