The Johannes String Quartet plays Mozart, Dutilleux, and Brahms

Her remarks should ring a bell with anyone who follows classical music. Extras like that have become a standard feature of the music scene since I started reviewing 25 years ago.

Sing-alongs? Most choral groups include them at the end of their holiday programs. Benjamin Britten anticipated the audience participation trend by decades when he included passages for the audience in two of his best-loved cantatas, St. Nicholas and Noye’s Fludde.

The Philadelphia Orchestra play-ins extend the revelry to instrumentalists. At the last play-in, 175 amateur cellists played with Philadelphia Orchestra musicians and a visiting soloist, Alisa Weilerstein.

Chats with the audience? The musicians at period instrument concerts frequently hang around the performance area during intermissions and answer questions about their instruments. Most local chamber music concerts include a post-concert reception with opportunities to mingle with the performers.

Some organizations opt for more formal interactions. The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia’s post-concert interviews with visiting soloists are always well attended. The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society precedes some concerts with lectures and posts interviews with musicians on its website.

I frequently find myself looking around a reception thinking of the great insight expounded by composer Ned Rorem: A concert is that which precedes a party.

Knowing who's who

The PCMS recital presented by the Johannes Quartet highlighted an aspect of the chamber music scene that can be just as attractive as personal contacts and just as meaningful: the bonds local audiences develop with musicians who, for their part, have formed long-term relationships with the Philadelphia area.

The members of the Johannes Quartet are all familiar faces to Philadelphia audiences, as chamber players and in other roles. First violin Soovin Kim has been swaying local audiences since he was a student at Curtis and an up-and-coming Astral Artist. Peter Stumpf spent twelve years as the associate principal cello of the Philadelphia Orchestra before he defected to California to become the principal cellist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Choong-Jin Chang is the current principal viola of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Second violin Jessica Lee belongs to that fabled cohort who enter Curtis around the time most children are coping with junior high.

As their guest for this event they chose another local favorite — Roberto Díaz, the current head of Curtis and Chang’s predecessor as the Orchestra’s principal viola. The program sold out in advance, and I only spotted a handful of empty seats, in spite of the weather forecasts.

Unlike many touring quartets, the Johannes foursome all enjoy thriving careers outside the quartet circuit. They are all performers who can command a stage by themselves, and you can hear the effect of that in their work. The Mozart quartet that opened their PCMS program felt like a conversation between equals and included some particularly lovely moments for the two violins, with the alto voice of the second violin sounding just as strong as the first. The Brahms quintet that ended the afternoon can present problems for the lone cellist, who can be drowned out by the other four voices; Stumpf came through loud and clear from the beginning and kept the piece in balance through all four movements.

The Brahms quintet is one of the most likeable pieces in the chamber repertoire — like most of Brahms’s chamber music — and the Mozart was composed toward the end of his life, during his best years. Between those two peaks of the standard repertoire, the quartet played something entirely different — a 1976 piece by the French impressionist Henri Dutilleux who died in 2013. The seven sections of Ainsi la Nuit (Thus the Night) capture nocturnal moods, from the agitated to the starry, with fragments of sound that explore a different musical technique in each section.

The Johannes will return in November, with the Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal bass, Harold Robinson, as their guest. They’ll undoubtedly attract a sell-out audience then, too.