Music Review

BOSTON SYMPHONY

CHAMBER PLAYERS

At Jordan Hall, Sunday afternoon

The Boston Symphony Chamber Players may be the most reliably excellent performing classical group in town, which is why it makes little sense that Jordan Hall had so many empty seats on Sunday afternoon for the players’ final performance of the season. The principal musicians from a first-rate orchestra were already a perfect match for this highly chamber music-friendly acoustic space, and their performances always flicker with a sense of adventure and love for their art.

The first half of the program was Russian, beginning with Stravinsky’s Octet for Winds. The texture was exquisitely multihued, with none of the brass domination usually found in this piece. The icy, cool layer of Elizabeth Rowe’s flute was just as audible as that of Richard Svoboda and Suzanne Nelsen’s buoyant bassoons, or Toby Oft and James Markey’s swaggering trombones, which contributed some fine, lithe runs in the second movement. There was not a throwaway note or phrase in the work, and all eight musicians were palpably unified in their intent and direction. The bright colors of the music radiated at every turn.

Double bassists rarely get to show off their virtuosic chops in the orchestral or chamber repertoire, and Edwin Barker made the most of every measure in Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Sonata for Solo Double Bass. Here his timbre was trembling and tender, and there as forward and full as a pipe organ’s. In bellicose dances or meandering soliloquies, each gesture and each note was so subtly differentiated that the sound seemed tactile.

Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Garden of Joy and Sorrow’’ was sparse and luminous. It evoked the unfathomable vastness and complexity of small things, meditating on Jessica Zhou’s tiny blooms of plectrum-plucked harp, misty harmonics from Steven Ansell’s viola, and bracing birdlike calls from Rowe’s flute. The piece was bookended with Ansell reciting a text by poet Francisco Tanzer, and the audience burst into laughter when the words “When is it truly over?’’ interrupted the first eager applause at the end.

On the heels of his critically acclaimed performance of Rachmaninoff’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra last week, Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes led the charge through a riveting rendition of Brahms’s Quartet in C Minor for piano, violin (Malcolm Lowe), viola (Ansell), and cello (Adam Esbensen). From the first pivotal gestures, the music ached with longing, passages of raging turmoil receding into interludes of respite and crashing back into conflict. The final two movements took a minute to click but then simmered with ardent tension, and the weighty strings contrasted with the agile piano as the piece streamed toward a conclusion of staggering catharsis.

BOSTON SYMPHONY CHAMBER PLAYERS

At Jordan Hall, Sunday afternoon.

Zoë Madonna can be reached at zoe.madonna@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @knitandlisten. Madonna’s work is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.