Exploring the space between the group and the individual

The Claremont Trio (from left: cellist Julia Bruskin, pianist Donna Kwong, and violinist Emily Bruskin) performed in the Sunday program. (lisa-marie mazzucco)

The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who studies the ties between social structure and evolution, once pegged the average human conversation at 3.4 people: a trio has room for one more, but add a fourth, and the group starts to split apart. No wonder Elliott Carter likes the string quartet. Each of his essays in the genre - from the groundbreaking First (1951) to the Fifth (1995), which the Laurel String Quartet performed at the Gardner Museum on Sunday - is a milestone in his ongoing musical exploration of the friction between the individual and the collective, the myriad and fluid ways distinct viewpoints coalesce and fragment.

The New England Conservatory-incubated group (violinist Yin Xue, violist Sarah Darling, and cellist Song-Ie Do, joined by their newest member, violinist David McCarroll) was sharp and vibrant, technically confident and keenly expressive. The piece - inspired, Carter has said, by watching musicians rehearse - alternates quick-take ensemble moods with sparse interludes in which the instruments trade scraps and punctuation, in turn engendering later movements: thin harmonics gathered into an eerie, suspended Adagio, brusque plucks snowballing into a gleefully chaotic pizzicato Capriccio. Even the brief final cadence is divided into solo phrases, the check split four ways after badinage that, in this reading, was both articulate and cutting.

To open the concert (inaugurating a week of programs by NEC, the Longy School, and the Boston Symphony celebrating Carter's 100th birthday), Do and pianist Pei-Shan Lee gave a superb account of the 1948 Cello Sonata. The contrast between Lee's cool precision and Do's precipitous, impulsive passion mapped another of Carter's favorite playing fields, the tension between music's formal architecture and its immediate, moment-to-moment expression.

After the Quartet, the Claremont Trio (violinist Emily Bruskin, her cellist sister Julia, and pianist Donna Kwong) was joined by Borromeo Quartet members violinist Kristopher Tong and violist Mai Motobuchi for Carter's 1997 Piano Quintet. Their collective virtuosity put a smart, witty sheen on the piece, the strings' sustained crooning and the piano's dry chatter in spunky contest. Carter has some fun with the cinderblock rumble of the keyboard's westward extremes, before the group comes together in brash, balletic give-and-take; the battle for the final word becomes a sardonic set-piece, anthropomorphically uncanny. In such conversations, Carter, to quote Emerson, has all mankind for his competitors.