A Trilling Performance by L.A. Flute Quartet

How much music out there is written for a quartet of flutes? More than you would think, and not just a flurry of transcriptions, either.

On Friday night, the Los Angeles Flute Quartet arrived with an ample amount of new and relatively recent music by California-based composers, aided in no small way by the spacious, warm acoustics of the Zipper Concert Hall. The hall made their collective sound bloom, which was apparent right from the start in the breezy, busy, neoclassical rhetoric of Ingolf Dahl’s “Serenade” (1955), the oldest work on the program.

There were a couple of newly commissioned pieces for the foursome: Christopher Caliendo’s soaring, sighing, irregularly flowing “Chovihano: Gypsy Healer,” and “A Paul Klee Gallery,” a mostly ruminative six-movement suite by Caliendo’s teacher, UCLA’s Paul Reale.

John Thow’s tense “Breath of the Sun” tried to evoke the habitat of the Chumash Indians with a lot of trills and extended techniques like flutter-tonguing and multiphonics.

Terry Riley’s trend-setting epic “In C” has been treated to all kinds of instrumentations, so why not a flute quartet? With percussionist Durand Baker establishing the gentle groove, the ensemble pulled it off handsomely, avoiding monotony with frequent switching of instruments. The quartet also has a welcome flair for showmanship, putting some jazz feeling into a fantasy based on Lalo Schifrin’s “Mission: Impossible” themes.