Thanks to support from the family and friends of its late curator, the avuncular yet discerning impresario Scott Nickrenz , Music at the Gardner, has  launched, commencing this past Sunday, an annual Scott Nickrenz Concert of chamber music at the museum’s Calderwood Hall. For this inaugural event, four exemplary string players (YooJin Jang and Geneva Lewis, violins, Emma Wernig, viola, and Jay Campbell, cello) and pianist Conrad Tao offered intense selections stretching from the early Baroque to the Jazz Age.

The four strings opened the afternoon with two of the 15 Fantazias (sic, also sometimes called Fancies) by Henry Purcell (1659-1695), which he wrote in1680 at the age of 21. They range from 3 to 7 voices, and he intended them for performance on members of the viol family, which even then was considered obsolete (the only member of that family in standard use today is the contrabass) and was out of favor with English royalty. It is therefore quite possible that Purcell wrote them entirely for his own edification and amusement, or at least for private performance. They are often compared, and not unfavorably, with the similarly virtuosic contrapuntal writing at the end of the Baroque period, namely J. S. Bach’s Art of Fugue and Musical Offering. In some ways Purcell is wilder than Bach, a bit like Gesualdo, with melodic lines crossing to create almost willful grinding dissonances and chromatic chord progressions that don’t quite sit within a diatonic framework that, by Bach’s time, had dispensed with the older modes.

We heard, using the most common means of identification, No. 5 in B-flat Major, Z. 736, and, despite some confusion in the program flyer, No. 11 in G Major, Z. 742. The handout had listed the second as “No. 7 in F major, Z. 738,” but that catalogue number is actually in C-Dorian (i.e. only 2 flats in the key signature). At any rate, No. 5 follows a common pattern of the full set, with a tune stated slowly, interspersed with faster contrapuntal riffs on it, while No. 11 begins more moderately then slows down before breaking into a brisk closing section. The effect (using modern instruments rather than viols) was mesmerizing and astonishing at the same time. To be honest, we’re not expert in Purcell, but these players (who, to judge by their bios in the program, do not perform together as a standing ensemble, so let’s for convenience call them FNE, for the First Nickrenz Ensemble), were as tight as one could wish, stately in the slower passages, pacy without breathlessness in the fast ones, and eager to dose the audience with Purcell’s quirky harmonies and collisions.

Without any real break, the group, now augmented by Tao, moved into another bit of quirky polyphony, the Suite No. 2 for four strings and piano by the American composer usually known as Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953, though she was just Ruth Crawford at the time, in 1929). This suite (the Suite No. 1 is for piano and woodwind quintet from 1927) is a fine example of Crawford’s avant-garde, freely atonal harmonic idiom allied with a lightly scored and contrapuntal interweaving of lines in a flowing and comprehensible form of discourse, with definite nods here to Baroque technique. The opening Lento offers a somewhat brooding, misterioso introduction, with a second section in a more inquisitive vein before subsiding. The scherzo-like second movement flows with grace and sometimes bounces before closing with the tempo and melodic reference to the opening of the first movement, a pattern repeated in the much brasher and rollicking finale, with great rhythmic punch in its section labeled giocoso. Again, the ensemble respected the linear trajectory of Crawford’s writing and brought forward the surprisingly abundant fun in it.

The main course of the afternoon’s forepart brought the timeline back to the 18^th century with one of its most seminal products, the F Minor String Quartet (No. 23 but most commonly just listed as Op. 20, No. 5) by Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). Many music historians consider the Op. 20 set (called the “Sun” quartets because of the picture of the sun on the cover of its first published edition) as Haydn’s definitive break from the old Galant rococo style into the new one he and a few others were forging; and No. 5 is often considered the pick of this litter for its Sturm und Drang intensity. Traditionally F minor is considered a particularly grim key, and many works have adopted this affect: when asked whether his Fourth Symphony was expressing the anxiety leading up to World War II, Vaughan Williams is reported to have replied, “it expresses the key of F minor.”

The Haydn opens in cimmerian darkness, against which even the restrained second subject seems idyllic. The struggle between the dark and the half-light was palpable. The ad hoc quartet left nothing to be desired in terms of unity, tautness of expression, dynamic control and bang-on intonation. As an interpretive matter, they did the unusual in taking Haydn’s repeats not only of the exposition, which would be standard, but also of the development and recapitulation, a practice more associated with his earlier style of writing. Haydn placed his minuet second in this composition, and by casting it in the minor kept the tension high (this minuet’s not for dancing!), only slightly relieved by the major-mode trio that sometimes suggested a Ländler. A degree of solace came in the Sicilienne slow movement, in which violinist Jang supplied a delicately filigreed of descant. The finale is one of Haydn’s great achievements, one of the three fugal finales in the Sun set, but this one played almost entirely sotto voce, with undiminished tension, until a sudden blast of volume caps it off. The performance was deeply expressive and impressive in technique.

Following intermission, the program concluded with a rare live performance of a rare gem in American music, the 1927(ish) Quintette for Piano and Strings, Op. 92, SO 610, by Leo Ornstein (1893-2002), still the record-holder for America’s longest-lived composer (there are discrepancies in determining his year of birth; his Wikipedia entry puts it in 1895), but a name probably unfamiliar to the majority of concertgoers. Born in what is now Ukraine, he received early piano training in Ukraine and Russia and composition study with Glazunov before emigrating to the US at age 12 or 13 and picking up further piano study at Juilliard. He became one of the most celebrated musicians in America, both for his prodigious virtuosity and his ultra-avant-garde compositions, with juicy titles like Suicide in an Airplane. Then, suddenly, in 1918, for reasons he couldn’t explain, an inspiration came to him to write a cello sonata in a lushly Romantic style (with modernist extensions), and the dam began to crumble (Henry Cowell never forgave him). Having burned out as a concert artist he retreated to Philadelphia, where he taught at the Philadelphia Musical Academy (eventually amalgamated into the since-shuttered University of the Arts) and he and his wife started a music school, teaching among others John Coltrane, and he was effectively heard from no more. But he continued composing, and in the 1970s he was rediscovered by some pioneering artists, including musicologist Vivian Perlis and Boston pianist Janice Weber, who recorded the piano quintet with the Lydian Quartet in 1997; Marc-André Hamelin recorded with the Pacifica Quartet in 2015. Live performances are rare as hen’s teeth; not one locally is recorded in the annals of the Intelligencer.

Having the recorded performances available  permits comparison between the approaches of the FNE and of those other stellar artists, and there is ample ground for doing so. But first a precis of the piece: The opening movement, Allegro barbaro, contrasts two basic ideas, the first a hard-driving, percussive almost machine-music theme area with a lushly lyrical, keening Hebraic theme (perhaps channeling Ornstein’s experience as the son of a cantor), and oscillates between the two, setting up the larger concept of a riven soul (there were some Jewish elements in the cello sonata, but they are much more prominent here and in much of Ornstein’s later music), torn between American modernism and the tug of heritage. There is, ultimately, no resolution to this struggle. The slow movement, Andante lamentoso, gives freer rein to the plaintive elements, while the finale reintroduces the conflict of the first, again without a clear winner. The only knock one can imagine for this stunning and passionate work is that, by reviving and not reconciling the opposites in the finale, it doesn’t advance the argument of the first movement and leads to a bit of fatigue in the listener. It’s still a great piece, well worth hearing.

Where one can hear differences in interpretive approach between FNE on one hand and Weber/Lydians [HERE] and Hamelin/Pacificans  [HERE] on the other was adumbrated in the introductory remarks by the George Steel, Nickrenz’s successor as Abrams Curator of Music at ISGM, a comment about the jazzy and even Gershwinesque elements in it. We’re not fully persuaded. Taking the latter first, there is but one passage in the first movement that has even a whiff of Gershwin; it passes quickly and we’re more inclined to say that Ornstein and Gershwin, contemporaries sharing a common heritage, were capable of expressing thoughts similarly, but Gershwin’s joyful celebration of American vernacular was not what Ornstein was after here. As to the former (which doubtless suggested the Gershwin comparison), we hear more of the Jazz Age than we do of actual jazz (though Ornstein was at least fleetingly acquainted with it from a trip to New Orleans in the 19-teens). A perusal of an Ornstein score shows immense rhythmic complexity, with frequent—almost incessant—meter changes. Jazz, even Gershwinian jazz, is different. Still, FNE’s approach is valid, and they brought it off with gusto.

Very much unlike the roughly contemporaneous Crawford, the textures of the Ornstein are dense, with the ever-present danger that the piano will overwhelm the strings, who are often fighting back in unisons/octaves. In this regard the FNE came in with a stellar product. This is, however, like practically every piano quintet, very much a pianist’s piece, at least in the sense of first among equals, and Tao was remarkable (because at Calderwood Hall the instruments are reversed in orientation for the second half of a program, we had the wing-up back side, which in this case had the advantage of diminishing the piano’s prominence), as indeed were all the strings, whose superior, dedicated and polished work belied the nonce-ness of their enterprise. A five-star experience.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.