Artistic quartet makes New York connection

Normally, the Chamber Music in Historic Sites series doesn’t strive to base its concerts on thematic links between the music and the chosen sites, the venues-for-a-day. Yet a strong New York connection hovered in the Salvatori Gallery of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Sunday afternoon as the Corigliano Quartet played music by New York composers against a backdrop of Abstract Expressionist paintings by the likes of Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofmann and Franz Kline.

This dynamic young ensemble was made possible by its namesake, composer John Corigliano. It formed at Indiana University in 1995 to perform the premiere of a quartet by Corigliano, who was sufficiently impressed that he urged the players to continue. A decade later, they remain ardent, down-to-earth and conspicuously accomplished champions of contemporary music.

Sunday’s New York City music-art link went only so far: Most of the Salvatori Gallery’s canvases are from Abstract Expressionism’s 1950s heyday, while the music dated from the 1990s and 2000s.

Stylistically, at least, the two youngest composers on the program -- Shafer Mahoney and Jefferson Friedman -- espouse a post-Minimalist “new accessibility,” in which Expressionism plays only a bit part. In Shafer’s mostly meditative quartet, rhythmic manipulations stir up excitement and also neo-Minimal vagaries from simple harmonic building blocks. The quartet by Friedman, formerly a rock musician and student of Corigliano’s, displays intense momentum and churning energy in its outer movements, which frame a fragmented, melodic slow section.

The ensemble was at its best Sunday when heating up its signature work. Bartok -- and specifically his fourth quartet -- is a touchstone for Corigliano’s powerful quartet. This eclectic five-movement piece grows out of, and ultimately returns to, ambiguous abstraction, but it also comes into sharp focus. Nervously motoric, clearly Bartok-ish manners in the scherzo contrast with the nocturne’s Moroccan sonorities, while the fugue is a fugal house of mirrors, with parts sent echoing and zinging in a tautly planned construction.

The work offers much for the musicians to sink their teeth and considerable chops into -- and they did.