MUSIC REVIEW : Vienna’s Artis String Quartet Shows Its Mettle

Count the Vienna-born Artis String Quartet as one of the reliably strong entities making their way through the crowded world of well-heeled string quartets. As heard in performance Monday at Pierce College as part of the Music Guild chamber music series, the 15-year-old Artis has most all the right stuff at its fingertips, including a cohesive spirit and a precision-geared clarity of purpose. All that may be missing is a taste for danger or daring.

To open, pieces fell into place in a neatly polished reading of Mozart’s Quartet in E-flat, K. 428, a work written by the fully mature, twentysomething prodigy in a nod to the proto-classical decorum of his teacher Haydn. On this turf, the Artis showed its mettle as a purveyor of things orderly.

A timely socio-political ambience surrounded Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, Opus 110. Although written in 1960, ostensibly as a diatribe against Nazism, the composer confessed that it was actually aimed at Stalinism. With its engaging slow-fast-slow structural arc, from mourning to rage to sarcastic jauntiness and returning to brooding introspection, the piece--keenly rendered here--serves as a tacit requiem for the wages of world turmoil.

Closing the program on a more innocuous note was Debussy’s String Quartet. If the Artis took things a bit stridently in the first movement--too Teutonic?--it found a more suitably velveteen path for the remaining three. The vigor of the second movement, lined in pizzicato, yielded to ethereal lyricism and capricious enigma, essential Debussy qualities capping a fine musical evening.

* The quartet will present the same program tonight at the Wilshire-Ebell Theatre, 4401 W. 8th St., 8 p.m. $7-$22, (213) 939-1128.