Alexander Quartet Plays With Sound

Venerable Bridges Hall at Pomona College has reopened this fall after a year of restoration and renovation. Saturday evening, the Alexander String Quartet gave the room a thorough acoustic workout with a well-chosen and well-played program.

Bridges Hall--affectionately known as “Little” Bridges, as distinct from Bridges Auditorium or “Big” Bridges--looks much the same, only freshly scrubbed and polished. The most immediately obvious difference is a new C.B. Fisk pipe organ, which will not get its debut for another year. Happily, Bridges Hall sounds much as remembered. Always a warm, supportive space acoustically, it seems largely to have kept those qualities, with a welcome extra bit of brightening and clarity.

At the center of the Alexanders’ program was “Kaleidoscope,” a short but eventful four-movement quartet by Karl Kohn, professor emeritus at Pomona College. In its opening sections, at least, this piece from 1964 seems to be as much about texture and sonority as it is about pitch permutations. The players and the hall projected its fluttering murmurs as readily as its more acerbic rhetoric, revealing a taut, expressive work clearly of its time, but also with classically enduring qualities.

Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 1 shares many of the same sound gambits, though in an almost neoclassical style. Webern’s plush and long-spanned Langsamer Satz, or Slow Movement, offered a detailed exposure of the lustrous, ripening side of the hall’s acoustic. The Alexanders--violinists Ge-Fang Yang and Frederick Lifsitz, violist Paul Yarbrough and cellist Sandy Wilson--played with grace and point. Violist Cynthia Fogg joined them for an individually characterful, collectively integrated account of Brahms’ Quintet in G, passionately surging yet architecturally balanced.

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The Alexander String Quartet will play the Shostakovich Quartet No. 1, Beethoven’s Opus 18, No. 1, and Brahms’ Quintet in G, Opus 111, with violist Evan Wilson, for the Music Guild, tonight at Cal State Northridge, Tuesday at Cal State Long Beach and Wednesday at the Wilshire-Ebell Theater. 8 p.m. (310) 552-3030.