Haydn Evening From Angeles Quartet

Haydn has found a happy home at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art courtesy of the Angeles String Quartet, which on Wednesday gave the second of three all-Haydn concerts this season. The locally based group, a poised and cohesive unit, has burrowed deeply into the rich deposits of Haydn’s seminal string-quartet repertoire as part of an ambitious five-year project to record all of the composer’s work in the genre.

The recordings will begin hitting the shelves this year, but the group has been making its work public in these concerts, concentrated doses that have managed to open ears and minds. One lesson to be gleaned from these programs is that the quartets are sufficiently varied and stocked with delights and idiosyncrasies to sustain interest with intensive exposure, when neatly articulated.

The members of the Angeles--violinists Kathleen Lenski and Steven Miller, violist Brian Dembow and cellist Stephen Erdody--understand what it takes to bring life to this music, which manages to be delicate but not fragile. They’re exacting, but not at the expense of robustness.

Four quartets from different periods in the composer’s life made up Wednesday’s program, from the Quartet in C, Opus 20, No. 2 to the later compact, two-movement jewel, Quartet in D minor, Opus 103. Haydn’s wit, ever lurking, bubbles up to the giddy surface in the Quartet in E-flat, dubbed “The Joke.” Playful violin glissandos creep into the Scherzo, with the effect of a sublime toy melody. By contrast, a prayerful Largo precedes a finale whose jaunty theme is, in contemporary parlance, mischievously “deconstructed.”

Closing the program, the Quartet in C, Opus 50. No. 2 revealed similar fragmentation of thematic material in the third movement, and a rousing race to the finish. In short, the Angeles again did right by Haydn.