Angeles String Quartet in Haydn Survey

On Wednesday, for the last of its three concerts this season in the Bing Theater of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Angeles String Quartet again offered, to a sizable, tuned-in audience, works from three periods in the career of Joseph Haydn, the composer under whom the quartet medium progressed from its infancy to ripe maturity.

The alert Angeles players--violinists Kathleen Lenski and Steven Miller, violist Brian Dembow and cellist Stephen Erdody--skipped the earliest stage and began with the Quartet in D minor from Opus 9 (1770), among the first to show the master’s hand, although it is still basically an accompanied first violin solo.

In Opus 55, No. 3, written nearly 20 years later, Haydn has made the quartet totally distinct from the concerto and symphony, and if the score isn’t as memorable as others from the same period, there remains the pleasure of observing the players treated at once as individuals and as a tight ensemble.

In the grandly sonorous Quartet in E flat, Opus 71, No. 3 (1793), it all comes together: technique subsumed by expressivity.

Of particular note in an exhibition of characteristically lucid, vital and polished music-making by the Angeles was their vivid projection of the latter work’s theme-and-variations slow movement--an operatic scena (was Rossini listening?) in which the brilliant “starring” soprano (first violin) is challenged by the somber alto (viola), with lively asides from soprano two (second violin) and wry commentary from the buffo, the cello.