As Chamber Music Monterey Bay introduced its new season last night at Sunset Center in Carmel, President Amy Anderson was on hand to greet the audience, welcome back the St. Petersburg String Quartet (SPSQ), and also to beat the drum for its new four-year project of commissioning new works —Arc of Life — the first installment of which will be a new string quartet by distinguished composer Joan Tower to premiere in April, 2012.

The fine players of the SPSQ, violinists Alla Aranovskaya and Evgeny Zvonnikov, violist Boris Vayner and cellist Leonid Shukayev, have appeared on CMMB’s concert season before, and undoubtedly will again in the future. The big buzz for tonight’s concert was guest pianist Anton Nel joining the SPSQ. Born in South Africa, and the distinguished first prize winner of the 1987 Naumburg International Piano Competition, Mr. Nel has best of all possible worlds — he has a tenured faculty position as Chair of the Piano Department at the University of Texas in Austin, and yet has a full career as a recitalist, concerto soloist and frequent collaborator with some of the world’s most distinguished musicians.

That he is a sensitive and stylistically meticulous chamber player was evident throughout the evening’s concert as he dazzled us with the ease and effortlessness of his playing in two major works of the chamber music repertoire: the Brahms Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor and the Dvořák Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major. Nel has his lyrical side with gorgeous sound and elegantly shaped phrases but can also turn on his virtuosity and move about the keyboard at the speed of light.

It was curious at last night’s concert that the first half of the program seemed rather muted and off in the distance. The opening work for string quartet, “Five Miniatures on Jewish Folk Songs” by Sulkhan Tsintsadze, was tantalizing with its elusive Eastern European flavors of sadness and nostalgia, but however charming, they were so brief and remote that they seem to have ended before they had hardly begun.

The second work on the program, the Brahms Piano Quartet in G Minor, also had a muted distant quality about it that left us waiting for something to happen. You couldn’t fault the quality of the players, for all the necessary aspects of technical mastery and first class musicianship were there; however, it was a distinctly low key performance until the tempestuous Finale. At that point, the musicians let the Genie out of the bottle. All of a sudden, the music came alive and took possession of our hearts and minds, so the performance had a great ending.

After intermission, we heard the magnificent Dvořák Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, and although it had its laid back moments (a very slow introduction to the first movement, and a very slow performance of the beautiful “Dumka”), ultimately, the final two movements created a exciting ending to this great work.

Responding to audience applause and standing ovation, the musicians reprised as an encore the exhilarating Scherzo movement.

End