The Arditti Quartet explores Berio territory

January should have been a big month for Luciano Berio in Los Angeles, with the unveiling of his new orchestration of “Coronation of Poppea” for the Los Angeles Opera. Illness prevented completion of that project, but, on the chamber music front, the legendary Italian composer has made his presence known in small, potent ways here recently, including the premiere of his latest version of “Sequenza XIV,” for cello, as part of the Arditti Quartet’s Monday Evening Concert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Berio’s “Sequenza” series showcases various instruments in virtuosic solo settings, usually stretching known technical boundaries, which in this case included rhythmically precise percussive tapping on the cello’s body and strings. Arditti cellist Rohan de Saram beautifully navigated Berio’s engaging, quixotic mosaic of sounds, involving languid long tones, brusque flurries, snapping pizzicato and jazzy tapped-out lines.

In a way, Berio’s alternately emotional and experimental work, placed in the center of Monday’s concert, was a microcosm of the program as a whole, which opened with a startling version of Beethoven’s “Grosse Fugue” and grew progressively more abstract, through the U.S. premiere of Helmut Lachenmann’s Quartet No. 3 (“Grido”). In that arid yet evocative piece, the group behaves as a mega-instrument, a color-producing machine. Its effects include clouds of closely voiced tones and a crescendo-oriented bowing style that sounds like reverse sound waves, but also suggests notes sent skyward instead of pulled down to earth.

The Arditti brought a rough, unpolished energy to the late Beethoven score, accentuating its intensity and cutting-edge character. Played in this rugged way, the music’s flowing madness and logic appear eerily like a foreshadowing of modernism, a century early.

Bridging Beethoven and the textural iconoclasm of the Lachenmann and Iannis Xenakis’ fascinating “Ikhoor,” for string trio, was Toru Takemitsu’s “Rocking Mirror Daybreak,” for two violins. Impressionism as seen through this composer’s unique prism, the piece celebrated silences, tonal ambiguities, and presented an overall fragile strength.

It was gratifying to see a large and exuberant audience along for the ride, testament to the Arditti’s standing as one of the finest and most respected contemporary music-minded string quartets around.