The bracing autumn temperatures provided the ideal atmosphere for the second of this season’s Harker Concert Series performers, the Los Angeles-based Calder Quartet. The evening repertoire began with Ben Johnston’s String Quartet no. 4, “Amazing Grace,” which wove the famous spiritual’s familiar melody into a tapestry of unconventional tunings, microtonality and increasingly intricate harmonies, the musicians making sure to keep the hymn’s melody lurking underneath it all. They followed up with a selection by Florence Price, the American Black woman to have a composition performed by a major orchestra. Calder Quartet masterfully interpreted the stylistic complexities of Price’s String Quartet no. 2, which fused traditional western music with the blues and Black spirituals.

They returned from the intermission with two powerful crowd-pleasers, starting with Samuel Barber’s famously mournful (yet hopeful) Adagio and concluding with Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 4, whose final movement brought the event to an exhilarating close.