Stern Modernism, Clarity From Parisii Quartet

Last week, the Parisii Quartet performed in the area under the auspices of the Music Guild, and appeared as a strong contender in the field of straight repertoire--the stuff of Haydn, Schubert and Beethoven. For the visiting French group’s appearance at Monday Evening Concerts this week at the L.A. County Museum of Art, the quartet turned the corner sharply into the 20th century and was an ensemble reborn.

It looked the same, but the music profile was something completely different, an uncompromising and often profound evening of music from Alfred Schnittke, Giacinto Scelsi, Witold Lutoslawski and their countryman Henri Dutilleux.

In this often conceptually charged company, Schnittke emerged the melodist. The iconoclastic Russian composer, who died last fall, made music notable for its stylistic flux, as his 1983 Third Quartet shows. A mercurial spirit guides the work, as it twines through materials borrowed from classical literature, punctuated by acerbic, abstract sonic effects.

Henri Dutilleux makes music in which color and texture rule. The group rose handily to the challenge of a painterly, collective sound in his “Ainsi la nuit” for string quartet from the mid-’70s, less about thematic development, per se, than an unfolding succession of impressionistic moments, memorable but fleeting.

For the mystical Scelsi, music was about the sound of one note breathing. His String Quartet No. 5 of 1984 proceeds with a series of aural starbursts, as the players explore the secret lives of overtones and adjacent tones. Lutoslawski’s 1960 String Quartet takes on elements of chance and strange ensemble behavior, and was performed with an apt looseness of fabric mixed with bits of startling clarity.

This was an evening of often stern modernism and fascinating forms and content, laid out by an accomplished quartet that sees no contradiction between the championing of music both old and new.