Founded and directed by Eva de La O, Musica de Camara has been presenting Hispanic musicians for 30 years in concert halls, community centers, churches, libraries and museums—often for audiences with little access to classical music. One of its recent discoveries is the Madison String Quartet, an adventurous, enthusiastic young group dedicated to exploring the Hispanic literature, for whose idiomatic rhythms and colors the players have a natural affinity. The performance, apart from some intonation problems in octaves and unisons, was admirable: secure, well-balanced, expressive, homogeneous in sound, unanimous in spirit.

In a quartet arrangement of Four for Tango by Astor Piazzolla, the players exploited all the resources of their instruments, including harmonics, slides, and knocking on the wood to imitate percussion. Teresa Carreno was born in Venezuela but spent most of her life in France and Germany. One of the first great women pianists and famous as a formidable virtuoso, she was also a conductor, singer and composer. Her String Quartet in B minor was written in the 1870’s during her marriage to the first of her four husbands, the violinist Emile Sauret. A substantial, four-movement work, it is clearly influenced by German romanticism; the Scherzo recalls Mendelssohn, the slow movement sings, the corner movements are fast, intense and turbulent. Its weakness lies in the modulations, that ultimate test of compositional skill. All four parts have demanding solos, which the players negotiated with panache.

The program’s most unusual work, which the Quartet recorded in 2004, was Miguel del Aguila’s Life is a Dream, inspired by Caldéron de la Barca’s play of the same title, La vida es sueno. It opened with three players on stage producing eerie-sounding tremolos with their bows behind the bridge; the first violinist, heard off-stage playing very virtuosic music, eventually joined them. All four musicians took turns reciting portions of Caldéron’s poem while playing; the music built to an intense climax, recapitulated the spooky beginning and faded away. The poetry and the music are arresting enough to stand alone; they did not seem to add anything to each other.

The audience demanded and got an encore: Aldemoro Romero’s Fuga con Pajarillo, Variations on a popular Venezuelan folksong. A fun piece, it began like a Bach Contrapunctus and became an intricate maze of multi-layered rhythms.