So I’m a sucker for great wind playing; I guess almost a band geek. But the first half of last night’s Chicago Chamber Musicians’ concert at Gottlieb Hall was proof (not that any was needed) that a bunch of wind players have as much a place on a beautiful concert stage as on a football field. The program opened with Franz Krommer’s B-Flat Partita. A renowned oboist once said of this work specifically, “It’s the kind of music that, you know, needs a little help.” Well, the CCM players gave it that and a lot more. I was “blown” over by the nuances and emphatic attention to detail the group displayed. Pitch perfect, wide dynamic range, all that good stuff. Charles Geyer’s trumpet playing added flair to the ensemble (as did, I suppose, Krommer’s instrumentation), and Dennis Michel showed off his superb technique and tone in some virtuosic passages in the closing rondo.

The group brought these same qualities to a set of Dvorak bagatelles arranged for winds and strings to close the second half.

(Aside: the printed program insisted repeatedly that the bagatelles were written in 1818, 23 years before Dvorak was born. Let it suffice to say the work indeed sounded as though it came from Dvorak’s earlier years.)

For the second half of the concert, the CCM reached into the file labeled “Huh?”—which includes the Verdi String Quartet and Wagner’s C-Major Symphony—and pulled out the Bruckner F-Major String Quintet. Bruckner was a man who had what we might now call a lot of “hang-ups.” He was overly sensitive to criticism, spending as much time revising his symphonies as he did composing them in the first place. Though it is for these symphonies that he is best known, not the few examples of glowing chamber music he produced.

Bruckner’s 1879 String Quintet is undeniably “Brucknerian,” go figure. It is the kind of work that if you sit waiting for something to “happen,” you’ll be sorely disappointed. You have to surrender to the intrinsic sonic beauty of the man’s writing. And the five quintet members at the CCM concert provided nothing if not sonic beauty. The musicians betrayed an innate sense of and sensitivity to Bruckner’s at times glacial harmonic progressions, though if you lost the harmonic plot over the course of the work, you could simply sit back and enjoy the aural splendor. Violinist Jasmine Lin deserves extra special kudos—she is clearly fluent in Bruckner’s musical dialect, and could probably have given the superlative performance she did without any music in front of her at all. But why name names? Everyone sounded lovely beyond compare. I dunno, how do you describe phenomenal string playing? I guess you just know it when you hear it.