Classical music can be just the thing to cut through the drear of a rainy day. To come across a free live performance by the Lydian String Quartet at the Rose Art Museum halfway through dreary Wednesday, then, was improbably fortunate. The Lydian String Quartet's concert at the Rose Art Museum Feb. 6, part of its Music at Noon concert series, attracted an audience of around 30 guests, seated to accommodate the avant-garde artwork in the museum's atrium. The quartet performed the Quartet in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4, by Ludwig Van Beethoven, and String Quartet No. 3, a modern work by Iranian composer Reza Vali. The concert showcased the quartet's mastery of both harmonic Western music and the more dissonant Iranian style. Violinist Daniel Stepner said the two works shared an "?Oe la turka" style but noted that Vali's music featured a few extra quartertones per octave, according to Iranian musical tradition.

The Lydian gave Beethoven's quartet a stately treatment. The opening allegro ma non tanto movement provided a cheerful counterbalance to the messy weather outside with alternating dramatic and soothing passages. The Lydian violinists playfully raced into the upper registers in the second movement, and in the third movement the group attained the peak of its fluid dynamism. The closing allegro reached an enthusiastic climax before returning to the docility of earlier passages.

Vali's composition was inevitably jarring after the undemanding experience of the first piece. The quartet brought renewed vigor to its performance in the second half of the concert, disregarding any aural reluctance with unflagging momentum.

The largo, which Stepner described as a "monologue for viola," distorted the instrument's distinctive purr into a rollicking groan while the rest of the quartet ceded the spotlight with a sustained hum. In the molto allegro movement, the group evoked the dissonant urgency of a piano falling down a flight of stairs, rasping and exhortative. Finally, the lento brought out cellist Joshua Gordon's low honeyed tones, while Stepner pushed his birdlike violin to the highest imaginable pitches. The quartet's siren-like wail faded into the distance, closing the concert.

The Lydian played with evident relish for their setting, the colorful timbre of their instruments resonating through the Rose's gray atrium. Despite the event's midday, midweek, midcampus setting, the music seemed to cascade through its environment entirely unforced. The next Music at Noon concert will take place on Wednesday, April 2, in the Rapaporte Treasure Hall.