Schoenberg supposedly remarked once that his music wasn't difficult, only badly played. He had a point, but in fairness he should have added that it is much more than usually difficult to play well. And the First Quartet comes with its own special complement of difficulties. It's enormous, for one thing — about 45 minutes in duration, longer even than the First Chamber Symphony from around the same time, and (like that work) in one continuous movement.

It's densely (indeed obsessively) contrapuntal, and closely argued in a way that seems crabbed and cranklike if the playing lacks a continuous urgency and forward direction. Everything has to speak at once in all its minute detail, and yet everything has to seem part of a massive, teleological design on a timescale that most string quartets have no experience in sustaining. All that passionate activity, never below a simmer and frequently at a rolling boil, must fit plausibly into a story whose ending surpasses even the close of Verklärte Nacht in blissful serenity. Alongside this gigantic interpretive challenge, the comparatively mundane pitch-and-rhythm difficulties of the 12-tone Third and Fourth Quartets look almost trivial (well, admittedly, not quite).

The Artemis' collective character is an unusual and distinctive one: high-energy, concentrated of sound, rhythmically active (sometimes almost fidgety), and clean of texture. All these qualities proved to be indispensable assets in the Schoenberg. The performance was passionate, but also detailed and transparent in a way that the frenetic music makes extremely difficult. The Artemis maintained that clarity over the work's entire span, without letting anything sound deliberately analytical. It was a performance of often naked ferocity in which you could nonetheless hear everything.

Moreover, the emotional range was exceptionally broad, encompassing not only unexpected tenderness but still-more-unexpected humor (anyone whose experience of Schoenberg's humor is limited to the rather broad variety in the Serenade ought to hear the Artemis Quartet in the more pizzicato-heavy passages of the First Quartet's scherzando section). But the glory of the performance was the group's unnervingly secure control of the music's trajectory. In a piece that almost always sounds like the mother of all musical run-on sentences, every development, every turn of direction in the vast score, made sense — and the ineffable repose of the last pages, for once, seemed something earned, something achieved. It was stunning.

The rest of the program was not quite at that level, though it came close. The quartet's take on Webern's Langsamer Satz, which opened the concert, was something of a surprise. Performers of this early piece (1905, but published posthumously) understandably tend to wallow in its lush harmonies and passionately late-Romantic theme. The Artemis, without seeming deliberately cold, nonetheless contrived to link the work audibly to later Webern.

The tempo was a shade faster than usual, the texture more transparent, the counterpoint clearer, the other parts less subordinated to the theme. To me it felt a little uncomfortable, neither fish nor fowl, but that's likely as much a matter of my own ingrained expectations as anything else. The performance certainly foregrounded aspects of the score that are almost universally slighted, especially the incipient traces of what in a year or two would become Webern's trademark fragmentary quartet textures.

Between the two Second Viennese School works came Beethoven's E-Minor Quartet, Op. 59, No. 2, in a performance distinguished by quick tempos, meticulously clean articulation, and the energy of a tightly coiled spring. The outer movements rushed onward with unfailing urgency, straight as an arrow. The inner movements, meanwhile, were in their different ways studies in delicately maintained textures — the hymnlike slow movement daringly sustained, and the Allegretto fast, nimble, and as precise as animated clockwork.

First violinist Natalia Prischepenko and cellist Eckart Runge, both exceptionally strong and impulsive musical personalities, were the dominant presences. (Prischepenko, by the way, played first violin throughout the program Tuesday, though on the Artemis' previous San Francisco visit and on disc, she and violinist Heime Müller have alternated as first and second violins. I don't know whether the quartet has now settled on her as first, or whether it just happened that all three pieces on this program were prepared with that configuration.)

The Schoenberg brought a near-unanimous standing ovation from those lucky enough to have heard it, but (wisely) no encore.

(Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.)

©2007 Michelle Dulak Thomson, all rights reserved