Jupiter Quartet Renders Russian Works Fit for Gods

As you'd expect from a group that's named itself after the king of the gods, the Jupiter String Quartet doesn't lack for confidence. This gifted and youngish foursome presented an ambitious program Wednesday at the Freer Gallery of Art that showcased two challenging, rarely heard works from Russia -- and brought them off superbly.

Dmitri Shostakovich's Quartet No. 7 may be the composer's most personal work; it's certainly one of his most moving. Dedicated to his late wife, it's a soul-tearing howl of love and anguish that, in the right hands, is riveting. The Jupiter players tore into it with real fire, in a deeply empathetic performance.

Shostakovich's onetime student Sofia Gubaidulina is among the most important and original of living composers, writing with a seriousness of purpose that makes most of her contemporaries look like dabblers. Her Quartet No. 2 is a case in point: Opening simply on a single note passed among the players, it blossoms into an exalting and utterly beautiful work. The Jupiter played it with equal parts daring and understanding.

Those 20th-century works were sandwiched between more traditional pieces. Haydn's Quartet No. 2 in F, Op. 77, brims with that mix of elegance and bomb-throwing subversion that keeps his music alive. The Jupiter performed it with freewheeling excitement and precise ensemble playing to open the evening and closed with a fine, full-blooded account of Beethoven's Quartet No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 59.

-- Stephen Brookes