Artemis Quartet a Complex Joy

Germany’s Artemis Quartet is one of those dazzling groups that play “difficult” contemporary music with degrees of precision and infectious zeal that make believers out of skeptics. The new music scene needs more such clearheaded, highly musical crusaders.

Certainly, difficulty was inherent in this week’s Monday Evening Concert at the Los Angeles County Museum. But the quartet brought illuminating clarity to complex scores from three towering Hungarian composers, Ligeti, Kurtag, and Bartok.

Violinists Natalia Prischepenko and Heime Muller alternate in the first chair, a fitting gesture of unanimity in this tightly meshed unit, alongside violist Volker Jacobsen and cellist Eckart Runge. Their unassailable cohesiveness benefited the intricacies of Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1, “Metamorphoses nocturnes.” Tucked into its fascinating trickery are alternating currents of angst, curiosity and touches of humor.

Kurtag’s “Hommage a Mihaly Andras, 12 Microludes for string quartet, Opus 13” unveils a dozen short movements, each distinct, but contributing to a mosaic-like whole. Despite the self-conscious structure, the impression is of freedom and intellectual probity.

Bartok’s Fifth Quartet came after intermission, as if the group were returning to the source of 20th century Hungarian Modernist thought. The players moved seamlessly from the second movement’s dank lament to the Scherzo’s jaunty dance, and from the final movement’s arduous intensity into the odd nursery rhyme-ish ditty, then back into Bartok knottiness.

For a contrasting encore, they pulled out Mozart’s quartet transcription of a fugue from Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier.”