The Boston Symphony Chamber Players, ten-strong, offered Samuel Barber’s Summer Music, Carlos Simon’s Gardner Suite and Antonin Dvořák’s String Quintet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 77 on Tuesday at the GBH Fraser Performance Studio. We watched and listened as the station captured it for later broadcast.

All the players wore red flowers in their lapels in solidarity with the BSO’s embattled Conductor and Music Director, Andris Nelsons.

“This concert marks 75 years of collaboration between GBH and the BSO*,” noted Sam Brewer, the station’s General Manager of Music, as he introduced the concert. He proudly pointed out that WCRB broadcasts the BSO Saturday night concerts live for 50 weeks a year. There was a time, of course, when WGBH-FM broadcast live both the Friday afternoon and Saturday night BSO concerts, and presented other live concerts almost every week from the Fraser Performance Studio.

(Hear Boston Symphony Orchestra broadcasts from Tanglewood on CRB on the radio and online Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, and Sundays at 7pm. WCRB’s Tanglewood broadcasts are also available to hear on NEPM, WMNR, and WAMC (please check their respective broadcast schedules for dates and times).

How prescient of the BSCP  to select Barber’s languid Summer Music for performance at the end of a day that set high-temperature records in Boston. Composed in 1956 at a time when the 46-year-old Barber was especially productive, it gathers four woodwinds and a French horn to distill the essence of a relaxed and dreamy moment on such a night.

Barber cites no specific setting, but it is easy to imagine a family gathered on a broad, front porch, perhaps like that of house where Barber grew up in Westchester, Pennsylvania. Too early to go to bed. Too hot to sleep. Conversation comes in fragments. Memories, gossip, unimportant questions. One person finishes another’s sentences. Others pick up on something mentioned previously. The stories have been heard before. The tone is almost elegiac until the some of the older kids briefly interrupt the musings; later the younger ones have their say. It’s all over in a dozen minutes, but leaves a sweet feeling that persists.

The piece opened with the bassoon of Richard Svoboda engaging with the horn of Richard Sebring. The flute of Lorna McGhee interjected a flutter of notes before receding. The clarinet of William R. Hudgins interrupts a bit forcefully, momentarily disrupting the quietude. The oboe of John Ferrillo emerges as the voice that restores the pervading sense of ease as it tells a story, perhaps about someone who is no longer there. It is masterful writing, as one phrase overlaps another, and later circles back to echo it. It would be easy to lose oneself in its lyricism, but the heartfelt playing and brilliant technique of the musicians compelled full attention.

Then, quietly, its single movement ends. All those lovely sounds that unleashed the imagination are silenced. It is breathtaking moment.

For the second piece, the woodwinds were joined by five string players to perform Gardner Suite by Carlos Simon, the BSO’s Inaugural Composer Chair, the first such in the orchestra’s 145-year history. He has also served as a composer-in-residence at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, where he was born. Now completing the second of his three-year BSO appointment, Simon told the audience how he was inspired to compose it after visiting the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Speaking with GBH’s Brian McCreath while awaiting the musicians’ arrival on stage, Simon said he “wanted to create an experience…. I saw something different every time I went there…. I am an artist, and when I looked at certain things, I could hear the music.” Like everyone else who stepped on the stage, even the stage manager, Simon wore a red flower in honor of Nelsons.

The six-movement Gardner Suite starts with The Courtyard. He captures the sense of wonder and joy that magical space inspires. Richard Svoboda’s bassoon joined Steven Ansell’s viola and gradually built to a tutti. The gaze rose from one balconied window to the next.

But behind the fascination was a curiosity to explore, and soon he stood before John S. Sargent’s El Jaleo. Rising clarinet and oboe lines invited the viewer to step into the painting and settle into in its smoky shadows. The viola made the dancer all the more sinuous. With strings on one side of the stage and the woodwinds on the other, the two sides set up a flamenco-like challenge to the dancer to outdo herself. The bass of Caleb Quillen exerted a driving force which cellist of Blaise dé Jardin and the violins of Concertmaster Nathan Cole and Haldan Martinson met head on.

The mood changed from mysterious to playful as the focus shifted to the Ostrich. Three ostrich eggs fashioned into drinking vessels in the 17^th century exemplify the eclecticism of the Gardner’s collection. The fragility of the eggs mounted on their silver legs is swept aside as the music imagines these strangest of birds waddling around in search of one another in pulsing, chattering non-stop motion.

Two Elders of the Apocalypse followed with its imaged discussions between two medieval knights carved in limestone in 12^th-centrury France. One spoke through the saxophone of William Hudgins, who briefly forgoes his clarinet, and the quavering flute of Lorna McGhee. The discussion between the two figures clearly has been going on for a long time. Ponderous questions were raised. Nothing will be settled any time soon. Best to tiptoe away.

We stopped next at Fra Angelico’s Assumption and Dormition of the Virgin. Simon, who grew up in a music-driven Pentecostal church, knows the power of sacred music. Here he introduced a hymn-like motif that has its roots in Gregorian chant. It was guided initially by an ethereal flute and filled out by the sonorous strings and the bassoon. The Holy Mother has died, but there are no tears here, rather an expectation of the miraculous. No surprise, then, that as the piece closed, a sense of things rising materialized.

The heavenly calm was instantly shattered as the scene moved to Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm in the Sea of Galilee. Here Simon emphasized the full bore on the storm which rose out of the bass and threatened to swamp the musicians. Quietly at first, the flute described an apparition slowly becoming visible. As the flute swelled, a figure made its way through the unrelenting waves. Closer it came until to the beleaguered fishermen in the boat, it took the form of their friend. The violin and viola carried the news to those trying to grasp it. Then, the sea grew calm, but the vision de-materialized — much like the painting that inspired it. Very moving.

The final movement, Courtyard Return, revisited the upbeat excitement of its first sighting, but shadowed now by a fond farewell in the strings. Time to leave.

It is an all too rare experience to have the composer sitting just across the aisle. Kudos to Nelsons and his team for bringing Simon to Boston.

The woodwinds excused themselves at that point and handed the stage over to the strings for Dvořák’s sumptuous String Quintet. Composed more than a century before Simon was born, but timeless, its four movements contained the exhilarating moments that musicians of the BSO’s caliber can bring out. The presence of the bass added a depth that provided instant excitement. And the collegiality of the players brought a much-welcomed sense of calm and order in a troubled time.

A vibrant Allegro con fuoco, led initially by a soulful bass, moved on to a lighthearted interplay among the other strings. Shorts bursts of melodic lines get exchanged. It is hard not to image it as formal dance. In contrast, the Scherzo conjures a folk dance from Dvořák’s native Bohemia with partners bowing to one another at the start. The playing was so beautifully balanced. No sentimentality here, just good feelings.

From first notes, the deeply expressive Poco Andante felt like a warm hug genuinely meant. Haldan Martinson felt especially soulful as he interwove Nathan Cole’s ardent pleadings.

The jubilant Finale wasted no time changing the mood with the bass coming into prominence even as the other strings engaged in frequent, lively counterpoint that dazzled with the precision these players brought to it.

As one would expect from a recording venue, the Fraser Performance Studio sounds crisp and clean. The space allowed the virtuosic playing from all ten of these exceptional musicians to reach us directly. Hardwood resonance chambers that line the Fraser’s lower walls enrich the sound even as baffling material on the upper walls control it. It seats about 80, of whom several were BSO players enjoying a night off. Others were contributors to WGBH being offered an exceptional thank you. 

Stephen Landrigan is a former print journalist and concert presenter.

*from the WGBH Charter: 

“In 1946, the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council (LICBC) was formed–a cooperative venture with six Boston colleges, broadcasting lectures on commercial radio. In April 1951, the WGBH Educational Foundation was formed, to launch an FM station that would carry the LICBC lectures. The “GBH” stood for Great Blue Hill, the site of the station’s antenna atop a Harvard-operated weather observatory. The incorporators and original board members were Ralph Lowell (as Trustee of the Lowell Institute), the presidents and treasurers of Harvard and MIT, and the president of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Noncommercial radio station WGBH-FM made its initial broadcast on October 6, 1951: the first Saturday-evening performance of the BSO’s 71st season, live from Boston’s famed Symphony Hall. The broadcast opened with words of welcome from Ralph Lowell and BSO President Henry Cabot. It was the first full-length broadcast of a symphony concert in Boston in 25 years.”