Music Reviews : Angeles Quartet

The track at Santa Anita may have been thoroughly soaked Sunday evening, but thoroughbreds of a different sort were running indoors. In another felicitous Chamber Music in Historic Sites pairing, the Angeles Quartet ran a mostly familiar course in the Chandelier Room of the Turf Club.

The program, heralded by a trumpeter in livery, offered as would-be topicalities Mozart’s “Hunt” Quartet, K. 458, and Haydn’s “Horseman” Quartet in G minor, plus the Quartet in E minor by Mendelssohn, Opus 44, No. 2. Nicknames aside, it proved an engaging, conservative agenda that would have been welcome almost anywhere.

Particularly in such fleet, balanced performances. The year-old Angeles Quartet--violinists Kathleen Lenski and Roger Wilkie, violist Brian Dembow and cellist Stephen Erdody--produced a soft, occasionally muffled sound, and revealed no sense of stylistic variance in its chosen efforts. But the overwhelming virtues of uniform concept and nearly flawless execution, supporting an understated interpretive stance, made for irresistible music-making.

In the rollicking outer movements of the Haydn and Mozart, the Angelenos supplied wit and dash in equal, cheering measures, and turned to similarly eccentric, upbeat fare for their encore, the finale of Haydn’s “Bird” Quartet, Opus 33, No. 3. They began the Mendelssohn work skittishly, but made a tour de force of the crackling Scherzo, retaining complete unanimity at bow-burning speed.

For all the precision and vitality of the fast movements, the poised, unaffected probing of the Adagio core of the “Hunt” Quartet may have been the ensemble’s finest achievement. The sweetly sung Mendelssohn Andante also exhibited persuasive, passionate polish.