The Rembrandt Chamber Players delivered the closing installment of their “Mahler Project” at the Merit School of Music’s Gottlieb Hall Tuesday night. Under the baton of Music of the Baroque conductress Jane Glover, the group capped its three-year-long initiative, during which they have performed chamber versions of Mahler masterpieces, with a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s transcription of “Das Lied von der Erde.”

The concert opened however with Charles Loeffler’s “Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola, and Piano.” The two unapologetically romantic movements (each inspired by a poem of the French poet Maurice Rollinat) were presented with a persuasive fluidity, the kind I’m to understand one achieves only with years (decades?) of familiarity with a piece and one’s partners on stage. In the second movement, subtitled “La Cornemeuse” or “The Bagpipe,” there is an extended recitative in which the oboe imitates that instrument. My only complaint was that oboist Robert Morgan executed it with better intonation and more supple note-endings than one should ever expect from a bagpipe, which is a long way of saying I had no complaints whatsoever about the polished performance.

The evening’s “main event,” as it were, was of course “Das Lied.” Schoenberg’s chamber transcription is a fascinating window into this epic work. What I most appreciated was the chance to hear the many compositional layers that can so easily be lost in an orchestral performance. Glover brought an acute sense of balance to the ensemble, allowing listeners to hear (perhaps for the first time) many of the composition's intricacies; a listener got an actual sense of polyphony throughout, as opposed to a wash of sound. Many expressive elements were also enhanced; for example, the winding string accompaniment to the lengthy oboe solo in the second song of the cycle, “The Lonely One in Autumn,” sounded if anything more haunting from the single violin of Robert Hanford than it does from an entire section.

The singers also benefited from Schoenberg’s distillation of the work. While in orchestral performances I’ve heard singers at times having to bellow to be heard over an orchestra, Tuesday’s soloists mezzo Emily Lodine and tenor Kurt R. Hansen were afforded the opportunity to explore more subtle colors than they might have at their disposal if they were trying to project over 120 people. They leapt at the chance, conveying a wide spectrum of moods. This spectrum was evinced in two of my favorite moments of the evening: the tipsy abandon Hansen brought to “The Drunkard in Spring,” and Lodine’s hypnotic repetition of the word “Ewig” (“forever,” “eternal,” “unending”—sorry, my German’s not good enough to have an actual opinion about the translation) that closed the cycle’s final song. Also hats off to pianist Andrea Swan for the ease and dexterity with which she played the thousands of notes Schoenberg was forced to throw into the piano part to keep the ensemble as small as he did.

All in all the performance was exquisite. The assertive, convincing, refined playing from everyone involved opened the curtains to a window on to what can be an overwhelming piece to take in, and was a fittingly grand finale to Rembrandt’s “Mahler Project.”