The Marlboro Festival was on to something when it championed the approach of mixing young musicians with seasoned veterans in a single ensemble, in theory wedding youthful vigor with the mellower virtues of experience. The most satisfying parts of Sunday's performance by early-career artists connected with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center were the works anchored by the well-traveled clarinetist David Shifrin: the Brahms Clarinet Quintet and Prokofiev's "Overture on Hebrew Themes."
The program, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, opened with the Prokofiev, for which the Israeli pianist Shai Wosner joined Shifrin and the recently minted Escher Quartet. The piece itself is a rarity, so it's a shame that the Gardner provided no program notes. Written when the composer was living in New York in 1919, it's based on some "Hebrew" folk melodies that were presented to him by former colleagues from the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Its lean string textures and evocative klezmer-style clarinet lines suggest the composer dropping by an old-world Jewish wedding. Shifrin's tone maintained its impeccable classical sheen - more Brahms than Brandwein - but the work's earthy charms still came across.
It was however the Escher Quartet that was centrally displayed on Sunday, most notably in Beethoven's remarkable late Quartet (Op. 130), which occupied the would-be heart of this program. Founded in 2005, the Escher has already made some notable headway in the overstuffed world of talented young string quartets, but Sunday's rather chilly performance of Beethoven suggested that it still has a lot of room to grow. Finely honed technique and a focused ensemble blend are this group's strong suits, and they might have been better showcased in, say, one of the Beethoven's "Razumovsky" Quartets. The interstellar vistas of Op. 130 demand an interpretive subtlety, flexibility, and poetic imagination that this group had trouble mustering with its rather breathless phrasing and with a palette of colors and an overall expressive range that were narrowly conceived. There are good reasons why many quartets wait a bit before embarking into the sublime wilderness of late Beethoven.
For his part, Shifrin has been performing chamber music professionally for longer than some of his colleagues on this program have been alive. In the Brahms, his wise and supple playing both paced and buoyed this work, prying open the airtight seal around the Escher's sound. The quartet was at its best in this context, matching Schifrin's silken tone with a dark ambrosial brew all its own.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.
