Boston Classical Review

Boston Artists Ensemble performed an all-Mozart program Sunday afternoon in Brookline.

Move over Johann Strauss: nothing says “Happy New Year” like Mozart.

That was the case for the Boston Artists Ensemble on Sunday afternoon, when a capacity crowd gathered at Brookline’s St. Paul’s Church to hear members of the group traverse the Austrian composer’s last three string quartets. Dubbed the “Prussian” Quartets, the triptych dates from the summers of 1789 and ’90 when Mozart was hoping for an appointment to the court of King Friedrich Wilhelm II.

Sunday’s performance from the ensemble of violinists Nicholas Kitchen and Tatiana Dimitriades, violist Rebecca Gitter, and cellist Jonathan Miller captured much of what makes the trilogy so striking. The group’s playing was lean and responsive, never getting in the way of the music. As a result, each installment evinced a strong sense of character.

The most straightforward of the three, the Quartet No. 21 in D major, offered engaging warmth and spades of songfulness. Its opening Allegretto was beautifully blended, the Andante well-directed and smartly phrased. If the collective tone was, at times, a touch complacent, the finale’s volatile harmonic shifts still spoke and its involved counterpoint sparkled.

Darker shadows marked the Quartet No. 22 in B-flat major. Here, the Allegro’s development was imbued with a particularly robust chiaroscuro, while the funky phrasings and folksy riffs of the Menuetto’s Trio section stood out for their sheer weirdness.

At the same time, the Larghetto emerged as a marvel of compositional logic and expressive focus, each line speaking with purpose. For its part, the brilliant finale was a model of bustling conversational rhetoric, saying exactly what it needed to before wrapping up with a coy wink.

For the F-major Quartet (No. 23), the afternoon’s performers channeled the extremes of the program’s first two numbers and amplified them. That was a good approach since this music showcases Mozart, though more or less working within the expected formal constraints, operating at his most creative and progressive.

Nearly everything about this work, from the first movement’s arpeggios and rushing scales to the Menuetto’s off-kilter phrases and the finale’s manic, chromatic denouement, is about gesture and development. Accordingly, Sunday’s reading boasted a kind of pungent loquaciousness.

Biting attacks ruled in the outer movements. Meantime, the Allegretto’s flowing sixteenth-note runs were beautifully dovetailed, unspooling around a subtly shifting rhythmic pattern that provided the aspect of a slow-moving mechanical clock set to music. For all its charm and seeming simplicity, though, the storm clouds are never far off, as the Menuetto’s bursts of turbulence reminded.

Appropriately, a clear sense of urgency permeated the afternoon’s account: exchanges between violinist Dimitriades and violist Gitter were particularly focused. This sometimes meant that a fitting bit of rawness crept into the proceedings, especially during the finale, where the line between madness and reason (or order and chaos) seems especially thin: what is one to make of the music’s diabolical turns and its whimsical sense of humor, like the second violin’s clucking grace note figures?

While the score raises plenty of questions, on Sunday several clear points of connection between this “Prussian” set and the efforts of later composers—not just Beethoven, but Brahms, Bartók, Ives, and Carter—emerged. Those timely links across more than 230 years proved as unexpectedly welcome in this New Year as the music’s demonstrations of unblemished invention, beauty, and joy were salubrious.

Boston Artists Ensemble performs music by Debussy and Beethoven at 8 p.m. March 6 at Hamilton Hall, Salem. bostonartistsensemble.org

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