String Quartet

After 22 years with RCA, the only label for which it has ever recorded, the Guarneri Quartet has switched to Philips. The group's debut under these new auspices pairs (as usual) Dvorak's "American" Quartet and Smetana's "From My Life" (Philips 420 803, CD). Simultaneously, RCA has reissued in its midpriced "Gold Seal" CD series (6263) the Guarneri's "American" Quartet, initially released in 1972. The differences are considerable, but either way, the playing is magnificent.

Eleven minutes and 22 seconds of what was once expected to be a major half-hour string quartet is not, quite yet, a comeback. But a little more than 11 minutes of very good music by a wonderful composer, loved by audiences and performers alike and simply one of the great musical forces of our time, is a start. What's to be done about Osvaldo Golijov other than wait? Probably nothing. His "Qohelet," which the St. Lawrence String Quartet played at Irvine Barclay Theatre on Sunday afternoon, had its first performance at Stanford University in 2011.

The world premiere of Alexandra Pierce's "Outcrops and Upshots" for string quartet will be given Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Emerald Room at the Biltmore Hotel, 506 S. Grand Ave. Also on the program: Mendelssohn's Quintet in B-flat, Opus 87, and Haydn's Quartet in D-minor, Opus 20, No. 4. The players are violinists Margaret Batjer and Sheryl Staples, violists Roland Kato and Michael Nowak and cellist David Speltz.

The first of the two-day New Zealand in L.A. festival at REDCAT on Wednesday night featured eight chamber and solo works by Kiwi composers, none with much of an international reputation, and a renowned performer on Maori instruments, Richard Nunns. The audience was quite small. Despite the wonderful “Whale Rider” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy (Nunns performs on the soundtracks), New Zealand remains musically remote. I'm intentionally ignoring Hayley Westenra. But that could change overnight.

Jazz violinists have not been the most numerous of improvisational musicians. String quartets have been even more rare, making the appearance of Richard Greene's ensemble at the Vine St. Bar & Grill on Sunday especially interesting. Greene's reputation has been established on the crossover fringes of jazz/rock and pop music, with stints ranging from Jim Kweskin's Jug Band to the group Seatrain.

By not being ubiquitous in the recording studios, by not feeling obliged to churn out every component of the so-called standard repertory, the Alban Berg Quartet of Vienna manages to create a sense of anticipation and occasion with each new release.

It could have been a major event, a perfect opportunity to delve deeply (finally) into Mexico's contemporary music repertory.

The city will begin its new classical music summer concert series with a 4:30 p.m. performance Sunday by the Pacific String Quartet at Beckenham Park. Residents are encouraged to bring lawn chairs and picnic baskets to the free concert, which is among the programs directed by the city's newly expanded Recreation Department. Alcoholic beverages and barbecues are not permitted. The park is on Beckenham Street, just east of Paseo de Valencia.

The Southwest Chamber Music Society kicked off its third season of summer concerts Saturday night at the Huntington Art Gallery with a bracing agenda of some rarely heard and long-loved fare. Yet, with half of the established Southwest String Quartet missing, one could only wonder if group dynamics prevented the performers from meeting the challenges at hand; second violinist Susan Jensen was out with tendinitis, and scheduling conflicts kept cellist Leighton Fong from participating.

When the St. Petersburg String Quartet made its Los Angeles debut Monday at Pierce College, the musicians managed to cover, with just three works, a telling swath of historical ground. Nineteenth-Century Russian romanticism came courtesy of Borodin's second String Quartet, the tuneful work co-opted by Broadway for 1953's "Kismet." Contemporary Georgian composer Zurab Nadarejshvili's mesmerizing first String Quartet of 1983 commemorated the World War II battle scars of his people.

This month's makeover COMPANY SNAPSHOT Business: Ice Bulb, based in Newport Beach, sells custom-made ice decor to hotels, restaurants and event planners, among others. Owner: Marc Entin Employees: 2 part-time, 8 temporary Revenue (2008) : $280,000 Founded: December 2007 Start-up funds: $100,000 in personal savings from Entin and his former business partner CHALLENGE How to find enough customers that want his higher-priced products GOAL Increase annual sales to $750,000 in 2010, educate people about the possibilities of using ice as decor, and become the leader in the ice industry MEET THE EXPERT Charlie Baecker is administrative director of the Don Beall Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Paul Merage School of Business at UC Irvine and a lecturer at the business school.

Leon Kirchner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer of expressive, rigorous, atonal yet romantic music, died Thursday of congestive heart failure at his home in New York. He was 90. A pianist and conductor as well as a composer, Kirchner stood somewhat outside the main musical currents of the late 20th century, forging his own way without being confrontational. A superb craftsman, he wrote music that was emotionally supercharged but also structurally rigorous, very much in the tradition of the Second Viennese School (Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, in particular)

The Music Guild uses a quote from the Los Angeles Times in its promotional material that credits the organization with bringing some of the best groups in the world to the Southland. I don't know how old that quote is. The guild has been around for quite a while and tends these days to function on the periphery, although with a devoted and sizable following. It began 65 years ago as a chamber music series at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. It has long been peripatetic. This year, it's presenting its main series of six programs at UCLA's Schoenberg Hall, Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Northridge.

When artist Ann Hamilton completed building what she called an acoustic tower in Sonoma County last year, Meredith Monk was on hand for the inauguration. She sent up the tower's central spiral staircase vocalists, a string quartet, a woodwind player and a percussionist, singing and playing as they slowly ascended, their sounds reverberating in the eight-story silo and producing what one imagines to have been a magical, site-specific "Climb Every Mountain" of modern art.

The Ying Quartet has been launched into chamber music orbit -- and it's easy to see why. These four siblings know how to attract attention. Timothy, Janet, Phillip and David Ying have been separating themselves from the pack with such offbeat projects as collaborations with the jazz-based Turtle Island String Quartet, folk musician Mike Seeger and future-shock electronics wiz Tod Machover.

The Calder Quartet -- suave in appearance and elegantly unified in its playing -- is the model of the sleek young string quartet. The ensemble's technical accomplishment is very high. The four men dress alike: fitted suits, black shirts, skinny striped ties. They have a reverence for the formal Classical style and for formal Modernism as well. Not much appears to ruffle them, which makes the Calder's recent interest in Terry Riley both unexpected and intriguing.

Now in its 28th season--middle age for a string quartet--the Tokyo String Quartet has a new first violinist: Mikhail Kopelman, a Ukrainian who for two decades held the equivalent post in the Borodin Quartet. Kopelman joined violinist Kikuei Ikeda (a member since 1974), founding violist Kazuhide Isomura and founding cellist Sadao Harada at Cal State Long Beach Saturday night.

Within the familiar pattern of performing pieces from three historical periods, the American String Quartet presented three life-and-death works Friday in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. In these works, Bartok, Schubert and Mozart all addressed issues that had less to do with entertaining anyone than dealing with their own lives and times, and that's the way the musicians performed them.

I'm afraid "wall of sound" may not be a musical term of endearment these days, given that the creator of this wailing electronic reverberation, Phil Spector, hasn't the most sterling reputation after his recent murder trial. But as far as I know, "shoegazing," which is what the British press liked to call '80s alternative pop with its fuzzy distortions, is still OK.

Tuesday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's "Sibelius Unbound" festival ventured into chamber music territory -- a field that a wag might dub "Sibelius Unheard." In other words, the Finnish giant is not known for his contributions to chamber music, and most of what he did write is considered juvenilia, not representative of his signature style.