The Chicago Chamber Musicians closed its season Monday evening at Gottlieb Hall with a rousing celebration of Robert Schumann’s bicentennial.  Schumann’s music will be easily heard in Chicago next season, and CCM gave its devoted audience plenty of reason to begin the anticipation.

Anchoring the program was Schumann’s Quintet in E-flat Major for piano and strings, performed by violinists Jasmine Lin and Joseph Genualdi, violist Rami Solomonow, cellist Clancy Newman, and pianist James Giles.  The five ripped into the lofty opening theme of the Allegro, remaining equally as passionate as the movement shifted to a more pleading melody; all the while, Giles kept the tumultuous piano rumbling below the strings.  The dark, plodding march that Schumann writes seems to anticipate the second movement of Brahms’ String Sextet No. 1.  Lin’s heavy bow set the tone for the sparse dirge, and the ensemble followed suit.  The racing Scherzo was marked by the ensemble’s rhythmic accuracy, and carried forward into the finale.  The continued repetition and soaring intervals recalled earlier movements, albeit with darker harmonic sonorities than the opening Allegro.  The quintet wound its way out of a masterful fugue into a blazing conclusion.

Preceding the Schumann was the Brahms Trio in A minor for clarinet, cello, and piano.  Schumann promoted the younger Brahms, and we can see the elder’s influence in the output of chamber compositions that were to come.  Newman and Giles joined veteran Chicago clarinetist Larry Combs, and the three achieved a richly balanced texture.  Newman scaled the range of his cello, which danced with the clarinet in playfully ascending and descending melodies.  The melancholic touches in the first movement gave way to a swarthy theme in the closing, a characteristic of many a Brahms chamber work.

Between the two Romantic giants was Bartók’s String Quartet #3 in C-sharp Major.  Only 36 years separate the Brahms Trio (1891) and Bartók’s Quartet (1927), but a new musical language had developed in that time, reflecting the vast shift in the global political and cultural environment.  The unnerving opening chord grows into an uneasy melody that is passed around the quartet.  Fragments of Hungarian dances bordered on chaotic as the musicians created glassy textures and biting staccato rhythms.  The Quartet is possibly the result of the outpouring of Romantic-era emotion with Twentieth Century madness.  The ensemble tore out the final violent chord before catching their collective breath and accepting a deserved ovation.