Versatile String Quartet in an Intimate Setting

The good news: A full house of 87 listeners heard the New Hollywood String Quartet on Wednesday night at the small theater called Inside the Ford at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre. The bad: The event had been moved indoors, 24 hours before, due to modest ticket sales.

Otherwise, this turned out to be a most happy enterprise, since it offered solid and admirable evidence of the ensemble’s burgeoning skills and artistry over its 20-month existence, and, this time around, two new works written especially for the quartet by composers from the film community. The new pieces, both in world premieres, were Don Davis’ moody, engrossing “Wandering” and Randy Kerber’s melodramatic Fantasy on Themes from “North by Northwest.”

The New Hollywood--violinists Clayton Haslop and Rafael Rishik, violist David Walther and cellist Paul Cohen--remains a taut, aggressive, highly accomplished musical body, with a wide dynamic range and abundant versatility. That versatility was put to profitable use in this program, which began with a put-together quartet by Mendelssohn and closed with the Quartet in F by Ravel.

The two movements of Mendelssohn’s unfinished Opus 81, with an earlier Capriccio, made a handsome, winsomely played opener that displayed the players’ deep sense of ensemble and their command of structure and nuance. The familiar Ravel piece proved a model combination of sweep and detail.

Kerber wrote the scores for “The Matrix” and “Jurassic Park III.” But he used music by Bernard Hermann for the Hitchcock film “North by Northwest” as the basis for his pumped-up Fantasy, which seems to follow an unstated scenario through its gripping, 13-minute length. Entirely tonal, it holds the listener through musical gestures both violent and tender.

There is nothing tentative or haphazard in Davis’ “Wandering,” but there are haunting qualities of yearning and melancholy through its three continuous movements. The composer, orchestrator for James Horner and Randy Newman, calls this, his second string quartet, an “essay in introspection.” It is highly compelling.