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.

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.

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.

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.

There are a few examples of jazz musicians turning to the string quartet--Gershwin wrote three small movements; Ornette Coleman once tried to do something avant-garde with one; Kronos has had straightforward transcriptions of Thelonius Monk and Bill Evans tunes made for it. All lose something crucial in the translation. Not so "At the Octoroon Balls," the string quartet Wynton Marsalis wrote for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1995.

The good news: A full house of 87 listeners heard the New Hollywood String Quartet on Wednesday night at the small theater called Inside the Ford at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre. The bad: The event had been moved indoors, 24 hours before, due to modest ticket sales.

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.

In the chancy world of the string quartet, with its huge investments of time and high failure rate, any ensemble that has played together for less than a decade more often than not has to prove itself as an entity. It's a distinct pleasure, then, to encounter what would seem to be the debut recording of the Mendelssohn String Quartet (not to be confused with the Bartholdy Quartet from Germany), a mature ensemble of youthful Americans formed only six years ago.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Angeles String Quartet makes a move toward international prominence with the release next week of a 21-CD set of the complete Haydn string quartets on a major label (Philips). It's an event because the complete Haydns aren't recorded as often as one would think, and the set has already been widely praised in Europe.

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.

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.

When musicians want to expand Beethoven's cycle of nine symphonies, they sometimes turn to his late string quartets on the grounds that there is more music in them than a mere quartet can extract. Usually it is the "Grosse Fuge," the huge, visionary original finale for the Opus 130 Quartet, that gets the blown-up string orchestra treatment. Camerata Nordica may be the first string orchestra to have recorded all five quartets (minus the replacement finale of Opus 130) for a three-CD box (Altara).