Biava Quartet is charged up for Town Hall

When the Biava Quartet is turned on, "it's a palpable electric thing that's impossible to describe," says cellist Jason Calloway from his cellphone on the New Jersey Turnpike. "We experience the same synergy that a sport team does when they're functioning at their best."

For this phenomenon to happen, though, a live audience is required. "We're not actors in the sense that we're waiting for an overt reaction or playing to the audience in an overt way. But we can feel the audience's engagement in what we're doing; it feeds us. The more of that we have, the better the performance. Hopefully, every time we're on the stage, we can turn it on. That's what we'd like."

The 10-year-old Biava Quartet, which returns to Seattle after its 2006 debut at the UW's International Chamber Music Series, hopes to turn it on again at Town Hall on Wednesday.

While the foursome certainly possesses all the exuberance of youth, its energy is also tempered by a mature thoughtfulness that has been shaped by the players' experiences both as music students and as teaching assistants to the Juilliard Quartet and the Tokyo Quartet at Yale University.

The founding members of the quartet, violinists Austin Hartman and Hyunsu Ko and violist Mary Persin, are all in their late 20s and have been playing together since their student days at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Cellist Jason Calloway knew Hartman from their time together in the Youth Chamber Orchestra at Temple University, whose maestro and teacher Luis Biava inspired the group's name.

"Pretty much everything we have as musicians comes at some level from those teachers who influenced our formative years," Calloway says. "Maestro Biava was encouraging and grandfatherly, but he also held us to the same standard he held himself to. I don't think anyone has ever met a more kind and generous human being."

Their upcoming program at Town Hall will reflect the group's desire "to straddle that fine line between preserving the past and creating something new," says Calloway, who at the ripe age of 30 is the group's oldest member and most recent addition (previous cellist Jacob Braun is now a member of the Formosa Quartet).

"Robert Mann (founding violinist of the Juilliard Quartet) said something early on in their career, that their mission was to play new music as if it had been written two centuries ago and old music as if it had been written last week. That is definitely our objective."

The ensemble's desire to rejuvenate old standards while bringing newer or neglected repertory to light is reflected in its upcoming program, with Mozart's "Hunt" Quartet in B Flat Major, Janacek's Quartet No. 1 and Grieg's Quartet in G Minor Op. 27.

Comments Calloway, "We open with one of the cornerstones of the repertoire. With any other piece I try to give information that will enhance people's listening. There's not much I could say about the 'Hunt' that would improve their experience, because Mozart has a way, especially with the third movement, that's divine. Nothing needs to or can be said.

"Then we take up Janacek, who developed, over the course of his career, a compositional language based on the Czech language, which made his music consonant and irregular like the way human speech can be. At any moment in any piece of his, he is impossible to mistake."

As for the Grieg composition on the program, Calloway calls it "a neglected masterpiece. It's huge, stormy, dramatic — a great workout for us and a great way to offer people a new experience."

Sumi Hahn: sumi@bewodo.org