It's a season of farewell for Austrian musicians.

Eminent pianist Alfred Brendel, 77, is on his final concert tour -- the Music Center at Strathmore is one of the stops in March. And the much-admired Alban Berg Quartet will disband this summer after 37 years (and a few personnel changes).

That quartet included Baltimore on its final rounds, giving a riveting performance Sunday for the Shriver Hall Concert Series.

Finality provided a musical theme for the program -- the introduction from Haydn's meditation on The Seven Last Words of Christ; Schubert's String Quartet No. 15, his parting work in that genre; and the Lyric Suite by the group's namesake, a score infused with the toll of a complicated love affair.

Berg's music is the least threatening to listeners unnerved by the atonal techniques of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg.

Even when he embraced Schoenberg techniques, as he did in this suite, Berg allowed glimmers of traditional tonality to create an extra layer of texture. Long before a quotation from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde subtly appears in the finale, the score resonates with passionate harmonies. Every dissonance here has expressive meaning, power and, yes, beauty.

The structural unity of each of the six movements and the ingenuity of the sonic effects (the instruments are fully exploited), came through in the quartet's intense, authoritative delivery. At the end, the sound of the viola's plaintive, two-note sigh, like the sound of a siren fading in the night, lingered long in the memory.

The brief Haydn excerpt was elegantly played. And the Schubert piece, with its frequent hairpin shifts of tonality (Cole Porter could have been thinking of this quartet when he wrote, "How strange the change from major to minor"), inspired all four players to remarkable lyrical heights.

The Berg Quartet will be leaving the field at the top of its game.

Before arriving at Shriver Hall, I was a little worried that my ears would still be ringing from the afternoon performance by the Washington Symphonic Brass at Brown Park Avenue Memorial Church in Bolton Hill. I haven't heard anything quite that loud since the last time I was in a rock club, but it was a good loud.

The ensemble, which draws brass players from regional orchestras and military bands, threatened to rattle the church's glorious Tiffany windows with the March to the Scaffold and Witches' Sabbath from Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, not to mention the thunderous pagan beat from Part I of Stravinksy's The Rite of Spring.

Phil Snedecor's brilliant arrangements of these orchestral classics made it possible to forget that there were woodwinds and strings in the original scores. For that matter, in his clever brass-ification of Orff's choral favorite Carmina Burana, I hardly missed the sound of voices. (Snedecor, who plays trumpet in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, co-founded Washington Symphonic Brass in 1993.)

There were a few losses of intonation and articulation along the way; and some details were obscured in the reverberant environment of the regally appointed church. But the 14 brass players, with five percussionists and a pianist filling in vital details, proved to be a sturdy, kinetic unit, capable not only of producing full-throttle volume, but considerable subtlety when required.

A fun concert.

BSO Webcast

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's season-announcement news conference tomorrow will be open to anyone with a sufficiently equipped computer. There will be a live Webcast of the event at 10 a.m. from Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, where BSO music director Marin Alsop and president/CEO Paul Meecham will discuss the 2008-2009 season.

Count on a lineup with a good deal of music by key Alsop mentor Leonard Bernstein, commemorating the 90th anniversary of his birth, and by one of Bernstein's heroes, Gustav Mahler. Not expected to return next season: the orchestra's Explorer Series.

To view the news conference online, go to bsomusic.org shortly before 10 a.m. tomorrow. Viewers will be invited to e-mail questions to Alsop and Meecham.

Choral offerings

Voices raised in song will animate the music scene in the days ahead. For more on the lineup of concerts, including the premiere of a choral work by Dominick Argento, check out the Critical Mass blog on baltimoresun.com.

tim.smith@baltsun.com