Beethoven was a trifle disingenuous in saying he did not learn anything from Haydn. The Tokyo String Quartet showed just how much the later master absorbed from the earlier one by juxtaposing Haydn's Quartet in G, Op. 76, No. 1, with Beethoven's in C Minor, Op. 18, No. 4, at Strathmore Music Center on Friday night.

Violinists Martin Beaver and Kikuei Ikeda, violist Kazuhide Isomura and cellist Clive Greensmith brought out the similarities between these works, written just two years apart. In the Haydn, emphatic unisons looked ahead to Beethoven's strong chords. The third movement was played as a scherzo, although Haydn did not label it as such, as he did the analogous movements of his Op. 33 quartets. The players emphasized the strength of the finale's minor-key opening, and paid close attention to the transformational violin solo that looks forward to Schubert and the little ditty of a theme that prefigures Johann Strauss Jr.

In the Beethoven, the spiccato delicacy and slightly lengthened pauses in the scherzo were distinctly Haydnesque, as was the opening of the finale. But the third movement's warm subtlety and the finale's prestissimo coda emphasized Beethoven's progress beyond Haydn's model.

It was another world after intermission, with cellist Lynn Harrell's 1720 Montagnana complementing the Tokyo Quartet's four Stradivariuses in Schubert's expansive Quintet in C, D. 956. The added cello enriches this work's texture without muddying it, and the performance was both emotional and thought-provoking. The near-stasis of the Adagio and the strange, emotionally fraught third-movement Trio were highlights of an interpretation both impassioned and burnished to a fine sheen.