The strings gave this performance a solid underpinning, but ultimately this was Wang's show. The 24-year-old principal of the San Francisco Ballet orchestra was half turned toward the audience, instead of his colleagues, and played with a gorgeously full sound — bright but warm with a husky undercoat that immediately reminds the ear of his mentor at the Curtis Institute, Richard Woodhams. Equally impressive was Wang's reliably fluid fingerwork and superb intonation. His playing humbled every challenge in this taxing work.

The Mozart, like the Martinu, was virtuosic but also engaging because of its subtly modulated sonorities. With quick tempi in the outer movements and a lovely, flowing middle aria featuring superb breath control and seamless phrasing in a warmly felt arc of sound, the music felt natural and comfortable with Wang's lead. He exuded a liveliness but directness that works perfectly in this upbeat Mozartian display.

When Wang returned for the three Romances (Opus 94) of Robert Schumann, the naturalness of his musicality emerged even more clearly, but he missed some of the potential of this deceptively simple music. The third Romance, for instance, was particularly lively, and opened with some perfect unisons — including beautifully judged hesitations — with accompanist Ji-Eun Kang. However, everything seemed just a little too fast in the notes that followed — great for emphasizing the requisite songfulness of the music, but occasionally hurrying it. Wang achieved the requisite simplicity, especially in the second romance (marked “simple, inward”), but the music can wax and wane better — it can converse. For instance, Wang didn't employ the beautiful sotto voce of his quiet tone often enough. These were pure and simple Romances, nuanced and resonant, but “wordless.”

The Beethoven substitution in fact turned out to be the major work on the program, lengthwise, but part of that time passed less viscerally than necessary because Prior-Runnicles' viola (often admittedly secondary parts) was too recessed to balance her colleagues and fill out the harmonic profile. The music often sounded like it was reduced to two parts. Albers and Hong, however, traded pointed staccatos in the first movement that kept things moving, and everyone contributed memorably sweet moments to sustain the second movement cantabile. The finale — surely a proto-Mendelssohnian scamper if there ever was one — was as effervescent as one could hope, thriving on Hong's solid bass line.

Once again, discipline, sonority, and momentum were the Broderick Ensemble's greatest friends. It seems unlikely that the Matthews quartet, or any other work, would have changed that.