On an extremely frigid Friday night that would scare most people back into the comfort of their warm, cozy houses, Boston Ballet Assistant Conductor Tianyi Ren worked with a massive collection of young string players to debut a new orchestra: Helix Ensemble at the Church of the Covenant in the Back Bay, pairing first-period Schoenberg with a reflective, defeated Richard Strauss in “The Zero Hour.”

Helix began the evening with Transfigured Night, Op. 4 by the 20^th-century giant Arnold Schoenberg. Retelling the same story of Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same name as a tone poem, Ren utilized Schoenberg’s string orchestra arrangement of the original sextet to make use of the full ensemble at hand. While most orchestras opt to embrace the passionate late Romanticism of the piece, producing an extremely soupy and thick sound through which the audience wades, Ren remained extremely restrained in his interpretation, letting the story speak for itself as the sound washed over the us. Three double bases, situated behind the rest of the strings, projected over everyone else. Sometimes, this hindered the cellos, but that was not a major problem throughout, as the orchestra tended to balance well. Despite all these nitpicks, the ensemble generally resisted the easy temptation of late Romantic indulgent melodrama, aided especially by Ren’s deep understanding of the style and control over the group. Watching Ren conduct, this reviewer felt completely comfortable under the baton. Soloists of note: violist Rita Hughes Soderbaum crooned a short by lyrical solo from the right side of the orchestra; co-concertmaster Mitsuru Yonezaki and Soderbaum shared a brief duet that carried deftly over the accompaniment, and cellist Asher Kalfus had a solo somewhere in the piece, although this reviewer unfortunately failed to notice. Overall, the performance worked well, though one problem arose over time: due to the extreme cold, some of the strings started progressively falling out of tune, which became more noticeable the longer the Schoenberg progressed.

After a brief seating change, Helix returned in its second half with Metamorphosen, an immediate post-World War II reflection by Richard Strauss. Strauss confronts the world of Beethoven and the marcia funebre from Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major “Eroica,” Op. 55 in the wake of the world-shaking destruction of the Second World War (this quotation may have also constituted Strauss’s ambiguous connections with the Nazi regime, according to Jeremy Eichler in “Times Echo”). Again, Ren found a restrained and reflective track to suppress the energy of the work until the perfect moments. It honestly makes this reviewer wonder what his interpretation of similarly reflective Mahler would be, such as Symphony No. 4 in G Major or Symphony No. 6 in A minor; those are questions for another Helix Ensemble concert, however. In some ways more subtle of an orchestration than the Schoenberg, Strauss utilized a lot more single section player or single desk instrumentations than the extremely thick Schoenberg, allowing more subtleties to come from each individual player. Of supreme note was co-concertmaster Darwin Chang, whose constant solo violin playing cut through his section and enraptured the audience with its reverence for the music and pathos. Living in his own little world reclusive from the other instruments, he seemed to exist in and isolation that Strauss must have felt. Speaking to more of the instrumentation, the violins and violas traded material and imitated one another quite well, two different voices echoing one another. The arrival of the Beethoven quote also came across to much effect, filled with a sense of overall dread and a creeping sense of understanding that the world we once knew was truly gone; Strauss mourned for it (and possibly lamented his own connections to Nazi tyranny, if we are to believe Eichler), and so did Helix Ensemble.

This new orchestra on the Boston scene is certainly shaping up to be something special. While we are not certain as to when the next concert will be, conductor Ren told BMInt the plan is to have a hybrid chamber orchestra performance of Bruckner 6 in April or May. If that should materialize, and this reviewer hopes it does, Boston will have another major orchestra contender on its hands.

Ian Wiese is an active composer, an Associate Professor of Ear Training at Berklee College of Music, and Music Theory and Composition Faculty at New England Conservatory Expanded Education. He is also the conductor of the Old Stoughton Musical Society, the oldest continuously operating musical society in the United States.