YsaÓ¿e Quartet at Perelman Theater

Some people like steak and eggs together, but I'm not one of them. There is too much slipshod programming on the classical music scene, in which disparate compositions are juxtaposed that have little to say to each other, and all too little of the thoughtful assembling that links works with a thematic relationship.

Happily, it was a program of the latter sort that the YsaÓ¿e Quartet offered at the Perelman Theater, featuring late and last quartets, two of them rarely heard and all very well performed.

Gabriel Fauré composed his Quartet in E minor in the 79th and last year of his life, and whether intended as a valediction it served as one. A listener unfamiliar with the work might be hard-pressed to place it in musical history, for although it's tonal in the late Romantic tradition, the independence of line assigned to its four performers suggests a certain modernity.

Like his elder contemporary Saint-Saëns, who produced a quartet of his own in his 80s, Fauré was comfortable with an achieved style at a time when the world of music was changing, and if there seems a touch of experiment in the E minor quartet, it is one conducted on the composer's own terms rather than a reflection of the radical goings-on in the Paris of Stravinsky and Les Six. Its three movements project for the most part an inward-looking, almost ethereal quality; this is music that never raises its voice, but doesn't have to.

Bartok with an edge

Béla Bartok's Sixth Quartet, his last essay in the form, might well have been his last original composition as well, but for the commissions that stimulated his final works: the Concerto for Orchestra, the unaccompanied Violin Sonata, and the incomplete Third Piano Concerto and Viola Concerto. The Sixth Quartet is related to them in its relatively greater accessibility, but it shares with such earlier works as Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta a rigorous and carefully balanced structure.

It can have an edge, too, when it's performed by a group such as the Takacs Quartet, which played it in Philadelphia in March. The YsaÓ¿e version was vigorous enough, but the group's innate elegance and refinement lent the music a bit of a French touch: different, but not unwelcome.

Rarely heard outside France

The real attraction, and the program's chief novelty, was Cesar Franck's Quartet in D. Like the Fauré Quartet, it was the composer's only essay in the form, and also his last major work. Once an international repertory piece, it's seldom offered outside France now; and you can go much of a lifetime, as I have, without the opportunity to hear a live performance. This is unfortunate. The Franck Quartet is nowise inferior to the Debussy and Ravel quartets that have eclipsed it, and in my view it's a more tensile and intellectually demanding work than either.

Its scope is large— Franck reportedly had the Beethoven and Schubert quartets at hand while composing— but there's not a wasted note in its 45 minutes, and Franck's invention never flags. For those unfamiliar with the score, the chief surprise was probably the fleet scherzo, played with muted violins and viola, whose unlikely model appears to have been Mendelssohn.

What a well-integrated program inspires

The heart of the work is its songful Larghetto, but the outer movements— as polyphonically complex as anything between Beethoven and Bartok— frame the work sturdily. As in the Bartok Sixth, too, themes are recalled from movement to movement, giving it a deeply pensive unity. Franck very likely had the Wagnerian leitmotif in mind, but could Bartok have been thinking of Franck? It's pure conjecture, but the sort that a well-integrated program inspires.

The YsaÓ¿e Quartet is a mid-career ensemble, founded 25 years ago by students of the Paris Conservatory. Their musicianship is exquisite, and they play with such fluency that it's hard to single out any member for praise. I must say, though, that the tone that cellist Yovan Markovitch drew from his instrument was remarkable.