The American String Quartet is familiar to Colorado audiences, so its performance at Gates Concert Hall on Wednesday night was akin to the comfortable company of old friends.
Closing another sold-out Friends of Chamber Music season, the venerable quartet was joined by Chilean-born cellist Andres Diaz in a luminous performance of Franz Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major.
Composed when Schubert was at the height of his creative productivity, the quintet is one of the Viennese master’s most enduring and significant contributions to the chamber music repertoire. And who better to capture its youthful energy, melodic gymnastics and dense harmonics than this finely calibrated ensemble.
Bringing 30 years’ experience to the stage, the American Quartet gave a fresh reading to a zestful work, marked by passages of musical respite not yet as polished as what Schubert might have been capable of had he lived longer than his 31 years. Violinists Peter Winograd and Laurie Carney led a delicate interplay with violist Daniel Avshalomov, while cellists Diaz and Margo Tatgenhorst Drakos made for a powerful duo in this bass- heavy work.
The sweetly engaging opening movement was punctuated by Diaz’s articulate musicianship, and the arguably dull scoring of the Adagio movement was redeemed by the group’s full- throttle rendering of the more mature, Slavic-sounding finale.
Contrasting Schubert’s early Romantic tendencies with the muscle of Johannes Brahms’ late-Romantic voice, the ensemble – this time also including violist Michael Tree’s unmistakably sonorous tone – played Brahms’ String Sextet in G Major with careful attention to the work’s intensely passionate, pensive texture.
The heroically hopeful sextet is about love, its four movements related by a common pattern of intervals that are disguised in different ways as variations on a theme. With equal commitment by all performers, this heartfelt reading suggested an exciting tension between the composer’s respectful adherence to classical form and his vivid, more stream-of-consciousness creativity.
In the end, a tempestuous clamor of sound indicated that – at least among these practiced musicians – artistic imagination trumps formula and intellect.
The ensemble performs again tonight at Lincoln Center in Fort Collins. Call 970-221-6730 for information.
