There are perhaps a dozen exceptional string quartets performing in the world today, and four of them are from the Czech Republic. The Panocha Quartet is not appearing in New York this season, but the Skampa will be at the New School this month and the Talich at the Frick Collection in April. On Friday evening at Weill Recital Hall, the superb Prazak Quartet made a strong bid for concert of the year.

The group (Vaclav Remes and Vlastimil Holek, violins, Josef Kluson, viola, and Michal Kanka, cello) was formed in 1972 and is most treasured for its unique sound, a color so spectacular that it only took a few seconds of the Haydn D Major, Op. 76, No. 5 to establish the extraordinary. Prazak’s sound is a magical combination of four very intense individual tones that remain distinct in performance, and a magnificent blending that produces the sweetest of tutti voices. The slow movement of the Haydn, marked “Largo: Cantabile e mesto,” dripped with beauty.

As this is a Czech group, the remainder of the program was from the homeland. It has been a good year for Erwin Schulhoff, as this was the fourth New York concert this season to feature one of his efforts. A Prague Jew, Schulhoff felt safe from the Nazis because he was an honorary Soviet citizen — and the first composer to set the “Communist Manifesto” to music — but perished in the camps soon after Germany invaded Russia. This night we heard his Five Pieces for String Quartet from 1923. Each is a different popular dance deconstructed and resurrected as something a bit askew. It was delightful to hear a Viennese waltz in 4/4 time, an exaggerated and elongated tango, and a wild but purposely clumsy tarantella. The Prazak captured just the right off-kilter spirit.

The main course was one of the mature works of Antonín Dvorÿák, the Quartet No, 14 in A Flat Major. Truly one of his greatest pieces, its large-scale conception owes much to Brahms, but the idiomatic language is homespun. Like a fully fleshed-out symphony, the opening theme re-emerges as the main subject of the introduction of the Allegro non tanto finale, having been transformed into a much more dramatic utterance through the peregrinations of the first three movements.

The Prazak poured heart and soul into this realization, with an integrity that is both indescribable and irreplaceable. If I had a quibble, it was that the dynamic contrasts could have been a bit stronger, but this is strictly a matter of personal taste.

The crowd was somewhat reduced because of the weather, but would simply not let these four men go until they played an encore. The group presented the polka from the String Quartet No. 2 by Bedrich Smetana, the “other” Czech composer, with great love and fire.

This music has the ability to make you incredibly nostalgic and homesick, even if you are not from Bohemia.

***

One of the most precious gifts Johann Sebastian Bach bestowed on posterity was the malleability of his music. On Friday, the New York Philharmonic, under the competent and sensitive leadership of one of its aspiring conductors, Alan Gilbert, presented three works that have their genesis in the mathematical genius of the Baroque master.

The first half of the 20th century was a time of distinct views of the ideal orchestral sound. Leopold Stokowski did everything on a large scale, founding new orchestras, developing big choral works at places like New York’s own St. Bartholomew’s, marrying Gloria Vanderbilt — but that’s another story — and undoubtedly the most famous arrangement of the music of Bach is his full orchestra version of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, which opened this program.

What a treat to hear an unabashedly fullbodied account of this powerful music! Mr. Gilbert appeared to relish the deep resonance of his troops, allowing for many loud passages that were gloriously in tune, with the lower brass free to establish the most gripping of anchors. Phrasing was luxuriously Romantic, colors vivid and opulent. Mr. Gilbert eschews neither the big gesture nor the full crescendo; some of the edges of this pounding sonority were a little ragged. Stokowski would have loved it.

Anton Webern heard similar music quite differently. Reacting to the elephantiasis of the fin de siècle and the huge orchestral scores of Mahler and Strauss that he conducted masterfully, this Austrian miniaturist orchestrated the Ricercar from A Musical Offering by Bach in the sparest of manners. While still employing a full ensemble, Webern adopted the klangfarbenmelodie technique, which instructed that an individual line should be composed employing a variety of color, but, as he heard it, using pointillism. Mr. Gilbert was quite impressive in leading this same orchestra, which had just growled its way through the Stokowski, in a rarified and polished traversal of Webern’s sonic universe. He brought out the inner voices in the strings and a level of precision that allowed the composer’s canvas of silence to remain pristine. To coax this level of purity out of the New York Philharmonic is no small task.

Robert Schumann enjoyed — well, experienced — a special relationship with the Rhine, eventually throwing himself into her arms in a failed suicide attempt. Before Wagner portrayed the Rhine in music, Schumann lit the way. The Phil ably played his Symphony No. 3, known as the “Rhenish.” Perhaps this wasn’t the ideal Schumann 3, but there was an infectious sense of flow that permeated this quite robust music making. In one amusing moment, Mr, Gilbert, with his demonstrative, youthfully enthusiastic gestures, turned to the violas for their big unison melodic opportunity, but, because of the bizarre platform positioning at the Phil wherein the sound boards of the violas face the center of the back of the stage, none of their sound reached the audience. The passage, fortuitously, is doubled in the horn.

The odd man out on this program was Gyorgy Ligeti’s Violin Concerto. An impressive work of lamentation, it is oddly scored for soloist (in this case Christian Tetzlaff ), small instrumental ensemble with violins and violas tuned to different pitches, and a huge percussion section. Mr. Tetzlaff, who often performs Romanticism such as the Brahms sonatas quite coldly, was noticeably warm in his interpretation of this thorny music, almost schmaltzy in spots. The refugees from the orchestra under Mr. Gilbert, however, were disappointingly wayward in their accompaniment, the solo horn sliding around as wildly as some of the patrons had just recently done on this icy afternoon.