A refreshing integration of serious and playful

St. Lawrence String Quartet ★★★ 1/2 With baritone Tyler Duncan. Music Toronto. Jane Mallett Theatre. Oct. 18.

On the eve of its 30th anniversary, the St. Lawrence String Quartet demonstrated on Thursday night how the serious and the playful can comfortably live side-by-side on a classical concert stage.

The Jane Mallett Theatre audience hosted by Music Toronto was left spellbound in a creative program that mixed the core of the string-quartet repertoire — courtesy of Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven — with two modern works that also included Canadian baritone Tyler Duncan.

It is rare to find this sort of programming outside the summer music-festival circuit in these parts, making it particularly refreshing.

The works themselves were intelligently paired: Two very serious vocal works alongside two pioneering pieces for instruments only that interwove humour and passion.

This was music that entertained as well as offered insights that deepened the experience to the level of communion.

The performers opened with Samuel Barber’s 1931 setting of Matthew Arnold’s 19th-century poem Dover Beach.

The words describe a moonlit seascape that speaks of a quiet desolation, both physical and spiritual.

Barber’s spare yet evocative setting, written when he was only 20, was sensitively brought to life.

Duncan’s voice has a broad range as well as wide expressive power. He used it to its fullest, sensitively accompanied by violinists Geoff Nuttall and Owen Dalby, violist Lesley Robertson and Christopher Costanza on cello.

The singer’s powers were also on full display in the evening’s closing piece, a dramatic monologue by contemporary Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov.

Drag Down the Sky, written for Duncan and the St. Lawrences in 2016, is meant to be part of an opera in progress based on the ancient Greek story of Helen of Troy and Agamemnon’s mission to go fetch her.

In the monologue, we find Agamemnon in torment over having agreed to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. It was an opportunity for Duncan to really show off his substantial dramatic abilities.

This was another spare setting, bristling with bits of jazz and blues. As in Dover Beach, the singer’s job is focused on conveying the full impact of the words than on having to sing a beautiful melody. The effect was electric. The sung works bookended Haydn’s C Major Quartet, Op. 20, No. 2, and Beethoven’s final Quartet, in F Major, Op. 135.

The Beethoven piece, played before the intermission, was a revelation. There is a special talent — and hundreds of hours of preparation — in conveying the shifts from light to dark in this music.

The St. Lawrences made it sound like it was happening in the moment, spontaneously, without ever losing a sense of where the music had to go. It was an outstanding interpretation.

The Haydn quartet was equally satisfying as the players outlined its humour as well as inventive structure.

Concerts like this give one hope that chamber music, the lowest-profile branch of the art-music world, stands a chance in a world filled with larger, brighter, shinier objects.