Tuesday’s program by the renowned Talich Quartet included an adventurous centerpiece, “Music Mundi” by Benjamin Yusupov, a work that Talich had premiered in 2008.

Yusupov is a 47-year-old Tajikistani/ Israeli composer who avows links to music of virtually all styles and ethnicities, something like a Middle Eastern David Amram. He says he seeks “to reach the core of knowledge and universal being.” Good luck!

“Musica Mundi” (Music of the World) is certainly eclectic and lives up to its title with small snippets of dissonant chords, rhapsodic solos, muezzin- like calls, Irish fiddle tunes developed at length, Easternflavored, slurred passages, some Jewish riffs and many other random effects all put together like a bad mosaic.

The music was full of ideas. But with no discernible center to hold them together, they saluted a lot of flags, but to what effect?

The excellent program was bracketed by the second quartets written by Mendelssohn and Shostakovich.

Mendelssohn’s 1829 Quartet in E-Flat, Op. 12, is a model of elegance, grace and absolute assurance by the 20-year old composer.

The Talich musicians caught every nuance in the sparkling Canzonetta’s pizzicato and staccato- strewn passages and in the Adagio they projected its elevated spiritual demeanor with an intensity that did not overinflate its context, a not uncommon problem.

The artists also struck just the right gravity in the opening Allegro and concluding Molto Allegro, emphasizing the music’s effortless, smooth lyricism and spirited, closing kick to form an ideal frame around the more substantive inner movements.

An even more impressive gauging of the necessary weighting, balance, gravity and coloration infused the performance of Shostakovich’s 1944 Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 68.

There are occasional glints of levity in this music, but they cannot camouflage its serious central message.

The artists were absolutely convincing in drawing distinctions between the lighter moments and its deeply moving moments such as the achingly beautiful and glacially slow Recitative and Romance, in which leader Jon Talich’s heartfelt, searing violin radiated almost frightening power and beauty.

Shostakovich called the third movement a “valse macabre,” and both its dark whimsy and diabolic insistence were superbly launched and kept aloft.

The concluding Theme and Variations is in two parts, a long build-up of gripping tension to a sharp climax, and a shorter denouement of slow, profound ideas in which the ensemble’s unrelenting accretion of power was absolutely spellbinding.

The audience’s outpouring of approval brought an encore, the delightful Intermezzo from Mendelssohn’s Quartet in A minor, Op. 13.

Concert Review

Buffalo Chamber Music Society

The Talich Quartet, Tuesday evening in Kleinhans Music Hall’s Mary Seaton Room.