The Hagen Quartet brought three stylistically unique works to Carnegie Music Hall on Monday night.

The sibling-founded quartet's program intriguingly contextualized the harmonic diversity between Beethoven's second "Razumovsky" quartet and Anton Webern's "Five Movements for String Quartet." Its insightful reading of Edvard Grieg's G-minor quartet gave the Pittsburgh Chamber Music Society audience a glimpse into that composer's increasing predilection for finding an authentically Norwegian compositional voice.

Beethoven's E-minor "Razumovsky" quartet and Webern's "Five Movements" occupy two distinct poles on the harmonic spectrum. The programming of these works next to each other highlighted and intensified their respective places in the history of Western music and made the enchantingly poignant quality of Webern's work readily apparent.

Written in 1909, Webern's "Five Movements" reveals the split nature of the composer's early creative output. Although this work was composed in a freely chromatic harmonic language that is not bound by the rules of functional tonality, the composition actually reveals the affinity the composer had for tonality and the diminishing role it was playing in his musical expression. This sense of loss is best appreciated in the second and fourth movements, with their extremely soft dynamics and fragmentary motivic statements.

The Hagen Quartet performed these movements with the utmost delicacy to project the softest of soft dynamics. The result was an exquisite portrayal of Webern's tender expression to play at a "scarcely audible" dynamic level. The way in which the quartet caressed Webern's motivic gestures gave their brevity the solemnity they deserved.

Throughout the work Webern required the quartet to play with abrupt, seemingly unpredictable changes in performance technique. The Hagen Quartet handled these technical changes with great alacrity, achieving a stellar contrast in the various tone colors that a string instrument can produce. Its opening "Heftig bewegt" (deeply felt) movement was a picture-perfect presentation of Webern's penchant for these schizophrenic changes in performance technique. Throughout the entirety of the composition, the ensemble's rhythmic precision was sublime.

Beethoven's E-minor Quartet, the second of the "Razuvmosky" Quartets, showed that the Hagen Quartet could articulate Beethoven's harmonic palette with an acute ear for its structural underpinnings. Though it achieved a seamless ensemble tone throughout most of this 1806 work -- especially in its nimble tracing of the running scalar motives in the development section of the "Allegro" -- the quartet was not afraid to push the envelope of the work's homogenous sound for dramatic effect in the louder moments of the finale's "Presto."

Emerging from the return of the first movement's minor tonic, the Hagen Quartet began the "Molto Adagio" as if it were a mournfully direct response to the previous movement's harmonic conclusion. The quartet's languid phrasing in this elegiac second movement brought out the exquisite pacing of Beethoven's harmonic narrative.

Grieg's G-Minor Quartet allowed the composer to showcase his agility at interweaving disparate motivic threads to create a tour de force of the string quartet literature. The Hagen Quartet brought this element to the fore through its ability to change its timbral color to suit the specific motive at play. These changes in tone color were especially effective in the final movement's fiery chromatic descents.

Critics Andrew Druckenbrod and Scott Mervis talk about music on "The Beat," available exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.