Arditti Quartet Goes Time-Traveling

Compelling programs performed splendidly are what we now expect from the 28-year-old Arditti Quartet, a regular visitor to local concert venues. The British-based ensemble--violinists Irvine Arditti and Graeme Jennings, violist Dov Scheindlin and cellist Rohan de Saram--returned Sunday afternoon, this time to the Coleman Concerts in Pasadena, and delivered a thrilling program, exquisitely played.

The agenda moved backward in time, from the recent, thorny “Sequi” by Australian composer Mary Finsterer, who was born in 1962, to Arnold Schoenberg’s early, and tonal Quartet No. 1 (1904-05). Connecting the two ends were works by Gyorgy Kurtag and Gyorgy Ligeti.

Finsterer’s difficult, 11-minute piece--it replaced the originally programmed new work by Magnus Lindberg, which was not completed in time for the current tour--seized attention and caused irritation with a lengthy series of buzzing motifs punctuated by pizzicato riffs and occasional silences. None of it seemed to make any sense--then it ended.

Still, “Sequi” proved a perfect contrast to the comparably mellow, equally fervent Schoenberg essay, a post-Romantic, Mahlerian work that ends with an apparent hommage to Richard Strauss.

Kurtag’s “Officium breve in memoriam Andreae Szervanszky” fascinates through 15 extremely short and moody vignettes that range from the thoughtful to the melancholy, the wispy, the argumentative and the conversational in about 13 minutes. The result is completely engrossing.

Ligeti’s Quartet No. 2, which the ensemble played on a previous visit here, is almost equally brief but somewhat more expansive. As usual, Ligeti expresses much, and always effectively, but in compact musical gestures.

This is a work of many contrasts, textures, tempos and broad dynamics. The program annotator, Priscilla Pawlicki, had it right when she described it as “spellbinding in its mix of emotion and intellect.”