Night music that energizes

Vermont’s Marlboro Music School and Festival sent another batch of alumni to UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall on Saturday night, where again they lighted up the room with their energy and controlled abandon. There must be a primal force within the idyllic Marlboro setting -- with its winding country lanes and whimsical “Caution: Musicians at Play” road sign -- that keeps them charged up from summer to early spring.

This time, in between the pages of Mozart and Mendelssohn, the Marlboro musicians inserted a modern masterwork from the doughty 88-year-old veteran Henri Dutilleux. Indeed, his string quartet “Ainsi la Nuit” (Such Is the Night), written in 1976, has caught on to some degree in the last 15 years, receiving several recordings. It’s not hard to hear why.

This is dissonant yet oddly alluring night music clearly descended from the middle quartets of Bartok, filled with mystery and a few outbreaks of terror, yet only as dangerous as a dream. It is one of the more accessible pieces by Dutilleux, who can be fearsomely difficult.

The ensemble (violinists Joseph Lin and Harumi Rhodes, violist Richard O’Neill, and cellist Marcy Rosen) was coached by the Juilliard Quartet’s Samuel Rhodes (Harumi’s father) in this work -- and one could hear the Juilliard’s bold individual strokes and big lush glissandos in their playing.

With O’Neill joining violinists Min-Young Kim and Michi Wiancko, violist Hung-Wei Huang and cellist Clancy Newman, Mozart’s early String Quintet in B-flat, K. 174, took off with elan and a full-blooded tonal warmth in which the violas were the dominant voices.

Whenever eight string players are in one room, almost inevitably they select Mendelssohn’s Octet -- the greatest piece ever written by a 16-year-old -- and they went at it with blitzing vigor and nervous energy.

Not everything was shipshape, but this piece still inspired an ardency among musicians that swept away everyone. The scherzo, shorn of its repeat, was reprised as an encore.