Southwest Chamber Fine-Tunes Quartet

Reasons to celebrate abound in Southwest Chamber Music’s summer prognosis: Its eight-concert, July-August Festival Series sold out two months ago and is now in its ninth summer season at the commodious Huntington Library in San Marino.

Most important, the organization’s reconstituted string quartet, which opened the 2002 concerts Saturday night, is a keeper.

On the open-air Art Gallery loggia, the ensemble--violinists Mark Menzies and Johnny Chang, violist Jan Karlin and cellist Paula Fehrenbach--gave a tight and satisfying program and thorough, bracing performances.

The accomplishment thus represented is admirable, for the four performed pieces require well-honed skills, abundant techniques and a versatile stylishness, which they received.

Donald Crockett’s abrasive but rewarding Second Quartet (1994) proved the apt centerpiece. It grabs and holds the listener taut through contrasting episodes in its 24-minute length.

Before the performance, the composer revealed to the audience that this work has a program, part of which Crockett outlined. One listener, however, enjoyed the performance purely on the abstract, pure-sound level, as a series of continuous emotional musical events.

The first movement, for example, carries ebullience past the point of frenzy before it winds down, its energy spent. The gorgeous, neo-Bartokian Adagio liberamente is as thoughtful as the opening had been compulsive. The handsome and tricky finale flirts with a chaotic scenario, using pizzicato and harmonics as its main languages.

Stravinsky’s tough and pungent Concertino for String Quartet (1920) also exacted a visceral but clarified response from the Southwest ensemble.

Contrasting Mozart quartets, the early K. 157 in C and the later K. 458 in B flat, “The Hunt,” opened and closed this pleasureful evening. Both showed the ensemble as a tight, accomplished body in which the skillful players enjoy making music together.