MUSIC REVIEW : Kronos Kicks Off LACMA’s Monday Series

Of all the contemporary-minded ensembles in America, only Kronos Quartet could have filled the Bing Theater as well as it did when launching the estimable “Monday Evening Concerts” series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was a gala of sublime proportions.

Everything worked toward the cultural good: A vastly larger audience than usual showed up for the series opener, and the string quartet took the opportunity to give one of its most serious and uncompromising concerts in local memory. It dug deep in a program virtually without flaw, and without crowd-baiting bonbons or post-modern gag items, which tend to dilute integrity and expand popularity.

In a performance made up entirely of L.A. premieres (though two pieces were heard in Irvine last spring), Kronos reminded us why they’re indispensable to the current cultural fabric. By tapping into world music influences, the quartet has become adept at pushing beyond Western ideals.

Julia Wolfe’s elemental “Dig Deep” deftly juggles dark, tolling chords and flittingly restless outbursts, which were purposefully performed with varying degrees of ensemble cohesion. The tension between opposites becomes a kind of running subplot.

Great microtonal American composer Harry Partch’s “Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales” entails bittersweet tunes, laid out by first violinist David Harrington, against pizzicato backdrops, and made more affecting by the ear-tweaking sense of pitch. Violist Hank Dutt assumed the spotlight in a heartfelt performance of Kevin Benshoof’s elegiac “Song of Twenty Shadows,” a piece of languid beauty that successfully blends 12-tone and romantic idioms--call it row-romantic.

Asian viewpoints figured prominently throughout the evening. Japanese composer Hirokazu Hiraishi’s “Prismatic Pulsation” (1975) is a beguiling process piece, in which short, repetitive phrases evolve ever so slowly. Vietnamese composer P. Q. Phan’s music, a highlight of the concert, took on the quality of an energetic, caffeinated conversation, with often overlapping statements.

Chinese-born composer Tan Dun provided the ambitious, genre- and culture-leaping “Ghost Opera,” a remarkable piece that took up the concert’s second half and featured virtuosic Wu Man on pipa --a Chinese stringed instrument. In this broad-minded, culture-bending opus, shards of Bach, Shakespeare, a bright pentatonic palette of Chinese origin and such sonic exotica as the water gong find peaceful and poignant coexistence.

At its best--Monday at LACMA, for instance--Kronos Quartet brings new ideas to the table and ensures a global future for the string quartet.