Guarneri group delivers a curious new Foss quartet

Lukas Foss’ new Quartet No. 5 was commissioned for the Guarneri String Quartet by a nationwide consortium of nine presenters -- one of which, the Coleman Chamber Music Assn., brought the piece, and the Guarneri, to Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium Sunday afternoon.

All this effort brought forth a 15-minute quartet of mercurial moods -- a monotonous, listless opening that soon becomes a grotesque miniature march; angular, jokey figures that form little stillborn fugues; eerie sustained lines that morph into a scherzo-like finale with a closing volley of insistent chords.

As a whole, the piece feels somewhat lightweight, yet it holds your attention and makes you curious about Foss’ first four quartets.

Elsewhere, the Guarneri brought to mind the image of a luxury car with a lot of mileage on it, one that takes a while longer to warm up on a cold morning than it used to. In both the Mozart Quartet No. 15 and the Beethoven Quartet No. 9, the first movements were plagued by distressingly out-of-tune patches and a leathery overall tone quality. Yet the slow second movements gave the foursome a chance to pull things together, and in the finales, they hit cruising speed.

Most pertinently, the quartet still finds important things to say about these pieces -- giving the Mozart an appropriately downcast, even tragic feeling, projecting a rustic quality in the Beethoven’s Minuetto and racing through the moto perpetuo figures of the Finale with drive and elan.