By Jonathan Blumhofer

With new works by Douglas Lora and arrangements of Beethoven, Copland, and Liszt, the ensemble showcased its orchestral range in Worcester.

The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. Photo: courtesy of the artist

The guitar, Andrés Segovia once offered, is a small orchestra.

That was certainly one of the impressions left by the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, which brought a program of original works and arrangements to the College of the Holy Cross’s Prior Performing Arts Center on Wednesday night.

The 46-year-old group retains two of its original members—William Kanengiser and John Dearman—but, in some regards, the foursome’s concert in Worcester was a celebration of the ensemble’s newest member, Douglas Lora, who joined in 2023. (Matthew Greif has been with the group since 2006.) Not only did the program include two of Lora’s original compositions, but both halves of the performance were framed by items from his native Brazil.

Lora’s most substantial contribution was Maracasalsa, a prelude and fugue that he described as his opus 1. Channeling the model of Villa-Lobos, who also liked to fuse Western and Brazilian musical forms, its first half proved dense but rhythmic, while the second followed a long and winding subject all over the map. If the latter might have felt as though it got lost once or twice on its way to the double bar, the paths it followed were consistently lively, dancing, and agreeable.

The night’s opener, Portal, represented Lora’s other compositional contribution. Heard in its world-premiere performance, the five-minute-long number more than multiplied Segovia’s aforementioned observation by four, reveling in the collective’s sonic warmth and luminous tone, at times seeming to swing like a pendulum.

Phillip Houghton’s Opals, a musical reflection on Australia’s national gemstones, presented another side of the ensemble. The excellent acoustic of the Prior’s Luth Concert Hall (the LAGQ was unamplified in the space) ensured that the outer movements’ dry, rhythmic gestures emerged with ample energy. But it also meant that the score’s most striking episode—the central “Water Opal”—came across as a study in ritualized atmosphere, the music’s percussive hits, bent notes, and harmonics speaking with haunting focus.

There was much to commend, too, in Kanengiser’s arrangement of the first movement from Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata: its glassy textures called to mind, at times, a fortepiano. Similarly, his idiomatic adaptations of music by Aaron Copland—“Simple Gifts” from Appalachian Spring plus the “Corral Nocturne” and “Hoe-Down” from Rodeo—impressed as much for their technical refinement as for the ensemble’s well-directed readings of each.

Additionally, Kanengiser was represented by an original work, Air & Ground. Like Maracasalsa, the composition involves nods to Baroque genres, though it culminates in a wild, bluegrass-infused coda.

On Wednesday, that section made for a perfect lead-in to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, with its impassioned “Lassan” and antic “Frisska” sections. The latter sounded, perhaps, more authentically Roma in this instrumentation than in the keyboard original; at times, the group’s sonority called to mind Anton Karas’s haunting zither soundtrack to The Third Man.

Though the zither isn’t necessarily associated with Brazil, there are plenty of variants of it found in that country’s traditional music. Imagens do Brasil, a set of three short works from that country, channeled, perhaps, some of that fare with zip and spirit.

While Sergio Assad’s arrangement of Heitor Villa-Lobos’s “A Lenda do Caboclo” stood out for its sheer beauty, the framing “A Furiosa” and “De Sábado pra Dominguinhos” were bright and biting. Much the same could be said of the quartet’s encore, a lively rendition of Sérgio Mendes’s “Mas que nada.”

Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer, violist, teacher, and music writer who has been active in the greater Boston area since 2004. In addition to the Fuse, his work has appeared in the Boston Classical Review, Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Notes, and other publications.