Haunting Golijov work played with devotion

Osvaldo Golijov’s large-scale “La Pasion Segun San Marco” won’t be performed locally until this weekend at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. But one of the Argentine composer’s shorter works, “Yiddishbbuk,” whetted interest in his music as it dominated a bracing four-part program by Cuarteto Latinoamericano on Sunday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

“Yiddishbbuk” takes its title from a collection of apocryphal psalms Franz Kafka referenced in a letter. “No one sings as purely as those who inhabit the deepest hell,” Kafka quoted from the collection. Golijov’s 12-minute work has that hell in mind as he memorializes three children interned by the Nazis at Terezin and ultimately killed. Isaac Bashevis Singer and Leonard Bernstein are commemorated in the last two movements.

Spectral harmonics eerily evoke the disembodied presence of the children amid a haze of emerging klezmer rhythms and textures. Passages of vital energy and protest fill out this mournful and haunting memorial, played devotedly by violinists Saul and Aron Bitran and cellist Alvaro Bitran, who are brothers, and violist Javier Montiel.

The program also included Heitor Villa-Lobos’ challenging Quartet No. 9, which was so rhythmically and imaginatively engaging that even first violinist Saul Bitran’s breaking his E string shortly after starting the third movement didn’t ruin the momentum. He had to leave the stage to replace it, and the quartet restarted the movement and ran the work to its whirlwind conclusion.

Completing the program were Astor Piazzolla’s “Four for Tango” and Diego Vega’s Cuarteto No. 1, a substitution for Julian Orbon’s Quartet, the score of which had been left behind at an earlier tour stop, according to a Philharmonic Society spokesperson. The quartet played Rodolfo Halffter’s “Tiento No. 5” as the encore.