Chamber music performance brilliant

Franz Schubert's ethereal String Quintet in C major ended the 11th chamber music program Saturday and will be the last piece played today in the final concert.

Charles Wadsworth programmed this for his final year as artistic director, a piece Spoleto Festival founder Gian Carlo Menotti often requested as a final one to end a festival. Schubert's Quintet is a 45-minute, four-movement work written in the last year of the life of the Austrian composer who died at age 31, probably having never heard this composition.

Many musicians, music lovers, composers and performers consider it the best piece of chamber music, if not the best piece of music, ever written.

The first two movements each move from serenity to turmoil and back.

The last two movements are glorious and triumphant with hints of folk music in the finale.

Saturday afternoon's performance was brilliant, with the members of the St. Lawrence Quartet joined by cellist Alisa Weilerstein. Violinist Geoff Nuttall, who succeeds Wadsworth as artistic director next year, led his musicians in a stunning account.

If anything, Nuttall underplayed his own part in the service of the greater purpose of the work. But in the big passages, it was no holds barred from him, second violinist Scott St. John, violist Lesley Robertson and cellists Christopher Costanza and Weilerstein.

The concert began with a lush account of the one- movement String Sextet from Richard Strauss' opera "Capriccio."

The performers from the Schubert Quintet were joined by violist Hsin-Yun Huang.

Schubert's Quintet made a fitting if bittersweet close to this year's series and to Wadsworth's 33-year tenure as artistic director.

This concert repeats at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. today.