Takacs Quartet and Garrick Ohlsson: Grand, special, risky

A mong the five of them, the Takács Quartet and its esteemed guest pianist Garrick Ohlsson have logged somewhere around 200 years of career mileage. So it's quite understandable they would need to do something grand, special, and risky, such as their current mini-tour with the infrequently heard Elgar Piano Quintet.

Sold out for months, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society concert Wednesday at the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater no doubt made new friends for the piece and pushed the musicians into a state of inspired discovery. Neither Takács nor Ohlsson have always been heard in the freshest form in recent years, and Takács gave one such performance early in the program, with Beethoven's String Quartet Op 59 No. 3. Passage work was smudged, especially in the first movement. Interpretive intentions wouldn't have been clear, at times, without the beaconlike security of first violinist Edward Dusinberre.

Later movements had welcome inner heat - a quality heard even more from the early Webern Langsamer Satz, written before the composer's conversion to modernism, and infused by the Takács Quartet with unfiltered nostalgia that made the music a dignified goodbye to, well, name it - starting with 19th-century Vienna.

Similarly, the Elgar quintet looks back to pre-World War I England. It's almost orchestral in scope, especially with later movements that are typically well-upholstered Elgar. The quintet's first movement, though, seems curiously experimental, with the first movement pairing nervous, rhythmic motifs against his more flowing lyrical manner, but in a way that suggests that, as in his Enigma Variations, there's something he can't quite say but that is of more vital importance than the earlier work. Something irreconcilable is being wrestled with here. In a performance with less concentration or long-term vision, the piece might have seemed incoherent.

Although an infrequent chamber musician, Ohlsson was ideal. He was willing to take a subsidiary role with rich but not ostentatious coloring. When required to emerge from the background, he did so graciously and with phrasing that captured the music's autumnal quality. Takács had all of the technical security lacking in the Beethoven. Excellent Elgar quintet performances have been heard locally from 1807 & Friends and Concordia Chamber Players. This one seemed to have lived longer with such curious, complicated music.

dstearns@phillynews.com