Presented by the Vancouver Recital Society. At the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Sunday, October 2

The Jerusalem String Quartet has been a sentimental favourite of the Vancouver Recital Society audience since its first visit in 2000, when only half of the members arrived from a tour stop in Colombia with their luggage.

This was on the very day they were scheduled to perform. Society executive and artistic director Leila Getz says she’ll never forget how hard she laughed when she saw the players on a run-through in their mix-and-not-match ensembles, second violinist Sergei Bresler, who is short and stout, flopping around in the pants and three-sizes-too-large shoes of Alexander Pavlovsky, the tall, slim first violinist. Soon it was sensibly decided that it would be a good idea to just play the concert in the sweats they had on when they arrived—which they did, and hardly to the loss of anyone’s enjoyment. In fact, it’s usually an enhancement to see that music means more than the clothes the musicians normally wear.

I don’t remember what they played on that program but I doubt that I’ll forget much about Sunday afternoon’s, when they returned to perform at the Chan Centre to what looked like a good house, though it was far from sold-out.

They played Johannes Brahms’s Quartet Op. 51, No. 2 in A Minor, one of those pieces that prove music is a time machine, one capable of creating an experience far beyond the ambit of one’s own lifetime. This quartet is the spiritual brother of the String Quintet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 111, which documents almost photographically Brahms’s enchantment at seeing attractive young women in a Viennese park, their large hoop skirts bobbing rhythmically as they walked. The Jerusalem’s performance was warm with relaxation and rich with the colour of ripe plums from Brahms’s tonal garden.

The other two pieces on the program evoked trouble: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s chromatic and restless Quartet in D Minor, K. 421 and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 11 in F Minor, Op. 122. And the young Jerusalem musicians adapted their style and colour spectrum beautifully, bringing especially potent immediacy to the short, aphoristic, and cryptic Shostakovich quartet.

With a program as stylistically varied as this, structure is very important. It felt emotionally right, for lack of a better term, to have the pieces in the order of Mozart, Shostakovich, and then Brahms for a satisfying closure.

The encore was a shimmering performance of the second movement from Claude Debussy’s lone String Quartet.

In all, it was a beautifully coordinated concert, and in more ways than one, clothes considered.