Music and Dance Reviews : L.A. Piano Quartet at Ambassador Auditorium

It is heartening to be able to acknowledge as our own a chamber group of such lofty achievement as the Los Angeles Piano Quartet, to fill the slot vacated by the demise of the lamented Sequoia String Quartet.

It is heartening, too, that the local boys are being engaged by major local presenters, as witness Tuesday’s concert before a sizable audience at Ambassador Auditorium and an upcoming appearance for the Music Guild.

The playing of the ensemble--violinist Joseph Genualdi, violist Ronald Copes, cellist Peter Rejto, pianist James Bonn--was, in a word, masterful. From the first, slithery measures of Faure’s G-minor Quartet to the unequivocally robust, celebratory conclusion of Dvorak’s Opus 87 Quartet, the four artists displayed unerring working-as-one instincts and accomplishments.

To state the Dvorak at once so aggressively, with such rhythmic spark and yet such a wealth of sentiment proved nothing less than thrilling, even to a listener who thought he had perhaps encountered this music a few times too often.

The ensemble’s commitment to expanding the relatively slender repertory for their combination of instruments was asserted with the presentation of the Piano Quartet commissioned in 1986 from locally based British composer Gerard Schurmann.

It is a work that grows in stature and appeal with repeated hearing--which the LAPQ’s advocacy has given us opportunity to do in the past two years.

Schurmann’s meticulously crafted, darkly elegiac piece--possibly the first viable addition to the repertory since Copland’s 1950 Quartet--has its reference points, to Bartok in the first movement’s melodic feel and the cyclical structure of the whole, and, perhaps more obliquely, to Prokofievan motorism and disjunctiveness in the central, toccata-like and particularly effective Capriccio.

Still, there’s no feeling of deja entendu about the work as a whole. It speaks with a sorrowing, eloquent lyricism that would seem to be the composer’s own and, as indicated by Tuesday’s reception, readily perceived and appreciated by audiences.

A single encore followed: the slow movement from Robert Schumann’s E-flat Quartet, with Rejto’s lushly glowing cello work as the focal point.