MUSIC REVIEW : Guitar Quartet in San Marino

A recital by the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet at the Huntington Library on Monday evening must have cheered all concerned. The second of three concerts supported by the Nakamichi Foundation, it filled the Friends’ Hall to overflowing--listeners lined the walls and spilled out onto the patio, looking and listening in through open doors.

The young, USC-trained group already has an ardent local following, which the performance Monday should certainly swell. Los Angeles in recent years has produced some significant multiple-guitar ensembles, and this--comprising Anisa Angarola, John Dearman, William Kanengiser and Scott Tennant--is one of the brightest and best.

Regrettably but necessarily amplified, the quartet’s program proved light and largely conservative. The evening’s two novelties, works by Ian Krouse and Paul Dresher, were replaced on the printed agenda with Moreno Torroba’s “Estampas”--offered last month at Hollywood Bowl by its dedicatees, the Romeros--and Leo Brouwer’s “Cuban Landscape With Rain.”

The playing of the typically Iberian scenes of “Estampas” and the minimalist pattering of Brouwer’s rain was alert to musical shape and direction as well as clear pictorial detail. Delicacy and brio were in abundant supply, intelligently guided.

Clarity and a relaxed modern sensibility characterized the performance of arrangements of dances by Praetorius and Bach’s Sixth “Brandenburg” Concerto. The ensemble observed period style more in the spirit than the letter of the law, delivering buoyant, engaging accounts. Ensemble cohesion frayed some in Praetorius’ ballet and the Bach Adagio, but without compromising momentum.

Effective, colorful arrangements of Holst’s “St. Paul’s” Suite and the first half of Falla’s “El Amor Brujo” completed the program in fine fashion. The vociferously expressed approval of the large crowd elicited a scrappy rendition of the third movement of the Third “Brandenburg” in encore.