How many ways can you say something with a string quartet?

Audience members at Chamber Music Sedona’s performance om Sunday, March 24, by the Orion Quartet had a chance to consider this question during the quartet’s masterful renditions of two very different works, Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15, D.887, and Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13, Op. 130.

While the Orion has performed in Sedona on several previous occasions, Sunday’s show was a unique and unrepeatable experience, as the quartet is currently on its final tour and will play its last show at Lincoln Center in New York City on Tuesday, April 2, before disbanding, bringing its 37-year history to an end.

One of the most prominent string quartets in the United States, the Orion Quartet was formed in 1987 by violinist brothers Daniel and Todd Philips, violist Catherine Metz and cellist Timothy Eddy.

Violist Steven Tenenbom joined the group in 1993. Tenenbom described the experience as a chance to “immerse ourselves in some of the most deeply profound music ever composed by man,” while CMS artistic director Nick Canellakis, a former pupil of Tenenbom’s, recalled attending the quartet’s free concerts at Alice Tully Hall as a teenager, and how the hall was packed with young listeners “whooping and hollering for Beethoven.”

Schubert

The opening movement of the Schubert quartet established a sense of delightful anticipation from the outset, beginning with a slow tremolo. The coordinated bowing of the Philips brothers, who have a strong family resemblance, was much in evidence at times, with their two instruments combining to form a single voice and then alternately diverging to give prominence to the first violin, with the first chair in this case taken by Daniel Philips. Schubert packed a lot into the first movement, the mood of which constantly shifted from anxiety to placidity to upbeat expectation. It had measures of great subtlety disturbed by the dissonant bickering of the violins, with Tenenbom’s sweetly old-fashioned viola moving beneath them, and marvelous melodies sprinkled with awkward chords. It also displayed Schubert’s fondness for building pyramids of notes out of rapidly-ascending-and-descending eighths and sixteenths, a technique particularly on show in his incomplete Seventh Symphony.

The second movement of the quartet is highly conversational. The listener is seized by the impression that it is in fact an argument among the instruments, an impression aided by the ease with which the Orion’s members worked together. Initial rumination with much passion from the cello gave way to a vigorous debate in which each instrument took a separate voice, eventually appearing to come to a half-agreement, saying, “We’ll agree to disagree.”

This laid the groundwork for the third movement, marked initially as a scherzo, but one with a surprising restraint of detail. It would seem that after agreeing on a general direction in the andante, the instruments then set off in that direction in the scherzo, with the viola leading the way. The tempo temporarily shifted to a danceable allegro vivace, with waltz-like moments as the violins talked to one another, before returning to the scherzo.

As for the fourth movement, it was skipping and undecided — lurching, in a way, as if Schubert hadn’t quite decided what to do with it. There were constant tantalizing glimpses of melodies that could have offered so much more if fully worked out, with a thread of uncertainty running continuously beneath them and total mood swings between easy confidence and internal strain. It would be fair to call the final movement a fitting apotheosis to the entire work that encapsulated and reinforced the suspicion that this quartet was basically a bright teenager, lively, undirected and full of potentially explosive ideas.

Beethoven

For the Beethoven quartet following intermission, the Philips brothers switched chairs, with Todd Philips taking over the role of first violin, which gave him a series of flourishing cadences to deliver while the others backed him up, their playing solemn and intimate. An easy exploration of the themes the composer initially set, the movement shifted between adagio ma non troppo and allegro throughout, rather than simply opening with a straight adagio-allegro transition as a Haydn symphony so often does. At once it was also obvious that this was a different kind of quartet than the Schubert piece, a more thematicallyintegrated work, which gave greater scope for the listeners to appreciate the seamless blending of the four players’ tones and their comfort with one another.

Coherence was likewise the central thread of the next three movements, the second movement most of all, which was short and assertive and featured some blistering fingering from Todd Philips. Movement three opened with a “woeis-me” attitude for all of 10 measures before getting over it and going for a casual walk. Beethoven incorporated hints of folk motifs here, and the feel of the music was rural and woodsy. This approach flowed nicely into the fourth movement with its elegance and grace, the early dance rhythm giving way to brisker but still danceable allegros.

As for the fifth movement, it shifted the mood considerably, with the instruments trading a yearning, resigned theme among themselves. The Orion brought out the “espressivo” part of the composer’s direction with great literalism and showed off their truly fascinating command of dynamics as the music shifted from forte to piano and then pianissimo with an underlying somber pulse in the background that recalled Mozart’s Requiem Mass.

Probably the greatest point of resemblance between the Beethoven and Schubert quartets, apart from both being written for four string players, was that in both cases, the composer couldn’t decide how he wanted the final movement to sound. After the Beethoven quartet received a cool reception from the audience at its premiere, the composer substituted, at his publisher’s request, a shorter and less elaborate allegro finale for the more elaborate fugue he had first written. The Orion, however, elected to respect Beethoven’s intentions and performed the fugue instead of its later replacement.

The fugue is much more dissonant than the rest of the quartet and also features a more prominent role for the viola. It opened with a strained air, followed by a little quasi-solo, the first of many, for the first violin. Again like the Schubert, it kicked around ideas without ever fully developing them as the instrumental voices scampered across one another. The tempo shift to allegro changed the mood from dismal to cheerful — but then the allegretto section got so busy it was practically reeling about the stage. This desperate disorganization led into the reprise of the fugal portion. Once again the two approaches intermingled, and it was ultimately the energy of the allegretto that triumphed in the concluding chord.

Quartet Talk

The Schubert and Beethoven quartets in combination provided an excellent illustration of how the same instruments playing within the same format can have very different conversations. In the teenager-like Schubert, and particularly in the argumentative second movement, each of the instruments stood out as an individual. Occasionally the violins collaborated, but that was more the exception than the rule.

The Beethoven quartet, on the other hand, can be heard almost as a miniconcerto, given the predominance of the first violin throughout except in the fourth movement and the way the rest of the quartet took supporting roles. Instead of the individual instruments having a debate with one another, they integrated themselves into a single voice that then played devil’s advocate against itself, as if the whole quartet was taking both parts alternately in a Socratic dialogue between Restraint and Impetuosity.

As another point of difference, in the Schubert quartet, the viola played a grounding and leading role, while in the Beethoven quartet, it tended to almost disappear at times, although achieving greater prominence in the fugue with its low tones. Beethoven also incorporated many more tempo changes within each movement of his composition than the straightforward Schubert had done.

But to have any conversation within a quartet, you have to have a quartet whose members can talk to one another through their strings, and the Orion Quartet proved itself supremely capable of that effort. They served up clean, sharp playing that was somehow comfortable at the same time, given their long history together.

Tenenbom’s viola gave a very solid, grounded, Elizabethan feel throughout, rather like oak, and Eddy’s cello was capable of surprising gusts of passion. Against them, the violins of the Philips brothers stood out with an unexpected brightness — and an occasional extra flourish of the bow from Todd Philips.

When the Orion sets beneath the musical horizon for the final time, their sound will be remembered in Sedona.