Music Review : Audubon Quartet Kicks Off Guild Season

Los Angeles being still a relative yearling as cities go, time takes on a qualified value. When an arts organization can boast a 50th anniversary, as the Music Guild is doing this season, there is cause for sounded trumpets.

The chamber music series, which started operations at the Wilshire-Ebell Theater in 1944, began its semi-centennial season there Wednesday with a mostly solid performance by the Audubon String Quartet.

For some unknown reason, a bagpiper commenced the evening with a Celtic processional in the aisles and onstage. Given the festive circumstances, however, the seeming irrelevancies could be excused.

As for the official performance, the quartet began a bit roughly with Beethoven’s String Quartet in E major, Opus 127, with ragged intonational edges and uneven ensemble weave. But they hit an impressive stride on Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, Opus 11.

An agreeable, mercurial mode of romanticism marks Barber’s first movement, but the piece will always be known for its elegiac slow section, later orchestrated and immortalized as the popular Adagio for Strings. Despite the theme’s potential overfamiliarity, when played with the degree of focus and controlled intensity heard here, it remains one of the most touching and saddest tunes in the West.

For the concert’s second half, pianist Mona Golabek joined in on an assured reading of Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E major, Opus 44. Highlighted by an effectively funereal slow movement and a torrentially scalar Scherzo, it provided the evening an aptly triumphant finale.