Can a string quartet truly go wild?

Can a string quartet truly go wild? That was the strange question that came to mind as the New Zealand String Quartet romped through a hefty program Thursday evening at the Strathmore Mansion.

This mature group of musicians – violinists Helen Pohl and Douglas Beilman, violist Gillian Ansell and cellist Rolf Gjelstein – injected the music with a youthful sense of abandon, relentless force and moody aggressiveness. It was all thrilling to hear.

The quartet moved through the swift trills, glistening curlicue phrases and snap pizzicatos of the rarely heard Gyorgy Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1 with unwavering energy. While myriad details peeked out, the quartet always maintained a strong, overarching concept of the work. The New Zealand saw this spiky score as an unruly beast, and the musicians yielded to its jagged, propulsive character, delivering an uncommonly fine performance.

After all that turbulence, Jack Body’s Three Transcriptions, which re-creates the sounds of various world instruments in a quartet, sounded downright tame. If the quartet reveled in the harmonic ambiguities of La Malinconia, the renowned introduction to the last movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 6 in B-flat, Op. 18, it went for a hard-driving ride at many points in Franz Schubert’s String Quartet in D Minor, “Death and the Maiden.”