Heartbreaking Smetana from the Wolf Quartet

Chamber music offers few dramatic moments as compelling as the searing high note that signals the onslaught of deafness in Smetana’s Quartet No. 1, “From My Life.” But what was life for him afterward? In fact, he left a musical record, equally autobiographical, in his Quartet No. 2, the centerpiece of a three-part program presented Wednesday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the youthful but accomplished Hugo Wolf String Quartet.

Completed exactly two months before Smetana died in 1884, delusional in a Prague asylum, the Second Quartet is terse, thorny and abrupt in mood change. As played by violinists Jehi Bahk and Regis Bringolf, violist Wladimir Kossjanenko and cellist Florian Berner, it was also heartbreaking and inspiring.

Gruff, conflicted passages surged upward into islands of tranquillity, recollections of private happiness or pride such as the composer had etched in the great tone poem cycle “Ma Vlast” (My Country). But such moments -- rendered as if recalled through a haze -- were soon splintered. The final upswing had a sense of willed, heroic, almost hysterical determination.

The Wolfians opened the program with Mozart’s Quartet in G, KV 156, a sweet, good-natured piece by a 16-year-old. The players’ beguiling, burnished “old world” sound may have been enhanced by the wonderful instruments they used -- violins by Guadagnini (1783) and Cappa (1697), a Mantegazza (1775) viola and a Gagliano (1819) cello -- on loan from the Brazilian firm Fazenda Ipiranga.

They closed the program with Brahms’ mighty Quartet in C minor, Opus 51, No. 1. The performance didn’t quite jell. The Wolf was formed in 1993 when the musicians were students at the University of Music in Vienna. They just might need more time to work out their approach to such a complex masterpiece.