A weighty program turns buoyant

The Paris Piano Trio and Ysaye Quartet have appeared in the Southland before separately, but never together, as they did at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall on Sunday afternoon. It turned out to be a collaboration of real distinction, easily justifying the program’s outsized length and content -- about two hours and 40 minutes, including intermission, of weighty German music.

In three configurations, the musicians produced near-ideal fusions of passion, energy and control, with nary a moment when their concentration seemed to flag, always serving the composers rather than their individual egos. And technically, there were no weak links among the seven players, hardly any passages that you wished might have been more cleanly executed.

There were no designated warmup pieces, either, for the Paris threesome opened with a vigorous, tightly welded performance of Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio, where distinction lay in details like pianist Jean-Claude Pennetier’s genuinely spooky piano tremolos in the bass during the second movement.

With Pennetier now through for the day, Paris violinist Regis Pasquier and cellist Roland Pidoux joined Ysaye violinists Guillaume Sutre and Luc-Marie Aguera, violist Miguel Da Silva and cellist Francois Salque in the Brahms Sextet in G, catching fire in the abruptly swift middle sections of the second and third movements.

To close, Pidoux and the Ysayes tackled Schubert’s always awe-inspiring String Quintet in C, just a bit self-consciously ardent in phrasing in spots, but with perfectly sprung tempos and particularly furious yet contained drive in the Scherzo. They even observed the huge first movement repeat -- which stretches an already massive movement to 20 minutes -- and made it seem not a bar too long.