Shostakovich Switch a Pleasant Surprise

One doesn’t usually go to the concerts in the venerable and largely conservative-minded Music Guild chamber series expecting surprises. But the audience got a pleasant one Monday night at Pierce College, when the St. Petersburg String Quartet made an auspicious program switch.

The group replaced Shostakovich’s mournful String Quartet No. 8, the well-known piece serving as a requiem for the ravages of World War II that was played at the composer’s funeral, with the lesser-known ninth quartet. Written for his wife in 1964, this work sails and squirms through its five unbroken movements, marked by a driving tension and energy. With an emotional terrain varying from brooding to wry urbanity, it sounds modernist and folky all at once.

As if resonating with the spirit of the composer who hailed from its namesake city, the formidable quartet realized the work with a compelling gusto. The musicians nailed its melancholic hush and its whimsical bragging, its murmuring sonorities, and they understood its syncopated pizzicato chords and knotty intensity in the final movement.

The quartet, whose appearances in the Southland bring the Music Guild’s season to a close, generally plays with a no-nonsense assurance. It opened with Haydn’s Quartet in D, Opus 20, No. 4, cleanly outlining its dark-to-light evolution, and, in the second half, captured the proper degree of romantic luster of Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet in B minor, with clarinetist Michele Zukovsky bonding into the ensemble neatly. Alas, though, the Shostakovich was a hard act to follow.

* The St. Petersburg Quartet will also perform tonight at 8, Wilshire-Ebell Theatre, 4401 W. 8th St. $7-$24. (310) 552-3030.