The Jupiter Quartet had me at the first stroke of their bows.
Commanding full attention, violinists Nelson Lee and Meg Freivogel, violist Liz Freivogel and cellist Daniel McDonough played a solid, strenuous program of modern and Romantic-era works to a full house at Gates Concert Hall on Wednesday night.
The youthful, award-winning ensemble was a credit to the Friends of Chamber Music series, especially in their blithe and tender reading of Daniel Kellogg’s “Coming Into the World,” a two-movement work written specifically for the Jupiter Quartet to celebrate the birth of the local composer’s first child.
In “Interior Thoughts,” through a beautifully woven interplay of circular harmonies, the ensemble expressed the happy anticipation Kellogg must have felt to know his unborn daughter.
In “First Light,” abrupt and more extroverted musical textures communicated a sense of curiosity and eagerness to begin life as a family.
Commoved by a shared intensity, the players’ headlong sprint through Felix Mendelssohn’s Quartet in F Minor opened the program in an utterly artful and absorbing exploration of escalating phrases that shone the spotlight squarely on their superb technical equilibrium and carefully cultured intonation — from the sparkling, wonderfully animated Presto movement through a delicate delivery of the lush, extended Adagio.
Lee then fearlessly led the way through Claude Debussy’s gentler — but decidedly vigorous — Quartet in G minor. Here, the governing conceit is a poetic, muted spirit of mystery that the foursome cloaked in a shroud of surprisingly sumptuous dissonances.
The program concluded with Robert Schumann’s Quartet in A Minor, a chance for the ensemble to flex their collective dramatic expression on a canvas of main themes and derivative themes that play out repeatedly, almost compulsively.
With unflagging energy, these fine, exacting musicians gave every sweet melody of the Adagio movement and stormy, pulsating rhythm of the breathless ending their due.
The tight relationships among the Boston-based group are obvious — Meg and Liz are, of course, sisters, and Meg and McDonough are married.
Such familial closeness naturally lends itself to a deep emotional understanding that transposes to their distinctively alive, affecting musicianship.
The evening kicked off with a well-deserved tribute to Allen Young, longtime FCM Board secretary and archivist.
