Last year, Mark Fewer got a new job. This year, the veteran faculty artist for the Colorado College Summer Music Festival is bringing his work to us.

As the new second violinist of the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Fewer joins a group that was formed in Canada in 1989 and has ascended to the top ranks of their profession. The ensemble will be here Tuesday night for the first concert of the Intermezzo Season, an early kickoff for this year’s music festival.

“He (Fewer) is a freaky good violinist and he’s figured a lot of stuff out just technically – he’s a machine,” according to Geoff Nuttall, first violinist and one of the founders of the quartet. “He’s totally aware, he’s incredibly experienced and he’s played most of the rep. It makes learning things super easy as well. … We’ve learned a lot.”

Nuttall admitted that the St Lawrence had a lot to learn when they first started. “It was ‘if we’re ever going to do this, now is the time,'” he said. “The first few years you need to rehearse a lot and you sound bad, so you can’t actually get paid to play. That’s when it’s really crucial. We’ve seen so many young groups that are being pulled and pushed by life and it makes it really hard to make a go of it. We’ve been totally lucky in so many ways..”

Nuttall believes he’s about got it figured out.

“It’s a really simple gig. You try to get better – to make the music connect easier and more viscerally with the audience. It was the same challenge then and it’s the same challenge now. I think we’ve gotten better – I hear better, play my instrument better, I think I have the ability to connect with colleagues and I think we as a group are able to assimilate and get through the nitty-gritty, nuts-and-bolts aspects of learning a piece faster than we did 20 years ago. That allows us to play better faster. I’m going to be 50 and it’s amazing to think you’re actually better than you were 20, 25 years a go.”

The quartet has referred to their Packard Hall program as a “Haydn sandwich.” They’ll open and close with legendary string quartets by the composer considered the father of the art form – Austrian classical master Franz Joseph Haydn – and then place some carefully chosen contemporary quartets in the center.

“Haydn string quartets – it does not get any better,” said Nuttall. “It gets bigger, louder, more complicated – but not any better.”

The music “inside” the sandwich includes two works actually written for the quartet: John Adams’ “Second Quartet” debuted in January and Marcus Goddard’s “Allaqi” debuted in 2009.

“John is such a rock star that when you get a piece of his you get booked to play it, rather than in the old days when you tried to shove the new music down the throats of the presenters against their will,” said Nuttall. “It speaks to his genius and his popularity.”

The relatively unknown Goddard has gotten a big boost from the St. Lawrence String Quartet. “For our 20th anniversary we had Canadian pieces from across the country and he was the guy that won the West Coast,” said Nuttall. “It’s really beautiful – much shorter, much more concise. Another Adams on that program would be death.”

The second Intermezzo concert on April 28 features another music festival stalwart – cellist Bion Tsang – accompanied by the festival’s music director, pianist Susan Grace. It presents a dream program for his instrument.

“Sue and I came up with it together,” explained Tsang. “I suggested the Boccherini (‘Sonata in A Major’) and Beethoven (‘Sonata Op. 69’) because, I have to confess, those two pieces are also on other recitals I have to play this season. Sue then asked for me to play some solo Bach (‘Suite No. 3’). And we thought the Falla (‘Suite Populaire Espagnole’) would balance out the program nicely.”

SLSQ Photo: Marco Borggreve