MUSIC REVIEW : Lafayette Quartet: Masterful, Distinctive Music-Making

The Lafayette Quartet, young in years but rich in understanding, provided an impressive finale on Sunday afternoon to the first season of concerts in the attractive, music-friendly surroundings of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library on West Adams Boulevard.

Their program, beginning with a delectably bumptious, sharply inflected reading of Joseph Haydn’s learnedly witty Quartet in D, Opus 20, No. 4, and ending with the titanic agonies of Beethoven’s vast C-sharp minor Quartet, Opus 131, revealed the talents of an ensemble that has all the technical problems so well in hand that they are able to put a distinctive stamp on their music-making.

In their convincing interpretation, Beethoven’s mighty monster sang as sweetly as it thundered, a welcome departure from the usual single-mindedly dramatic approaches.

Haydn and Beethoven were separated by a bit of historic Americana, the 1931 String Quartet of Ruth Crawford Seeger, in whose nine, action-packed minutes are echoes of Berg’s “Lyric Suite” and presentiments of Lutoslawski and Ligeti. But in its finale in particular, we’re also in the presence of something grippingly personal and original, with the wildly thrashing first violin pitted against the other instruments’ dark, scurrying whispers, before everything is repeated, but with the notes in reverse order.

The Victoria, British Columbia-based quartet--violinists Ann Elliott Goldschmid and Sharon Stanis, violist Joanna Hood, cellist Pamela Highbaugh Aloni--delivered this music, as they did everything on their stimulating program, with strong, lustrous tones, centered intonation and admirably wide dynamic range.