In 2002, at a concert at Weill Recital Hall, Gidon Kremer presented a piece by Sofia Gubaidulina that had a rather memorable conclusion. Once the music stopped, one woman stood and applauded loudly for some time, while the remainder of the crowd soon fell silent. Like Charles Foster Kane at the opera house, the lone fan had to retake her seat as the unwanted center of attention.

Ms. Gubaidulina’s trio “Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten” was featured on Wednesday afternoon at Alice Tully Hall as part of the weeklong Juilliard celebration known as Chamber-Fest 2006. The ensemble consisted of flutist Jessica Han, violist Eleanor Kaye, and harpist Michelle Gott.

Some of Ms. Gubaidulina’s works are uncompromisingly user-unfriendly, but many also reveal a decided spirituality. (Perhaps the young Tatar has mellowed from state-sponsored atheist to a pious member of the Kancheli-Gorecki-Paert school of post-millennial devotion.) Forgive me for employing the most misused word in our culture, but “Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten” is set to an existentialist poem by Francisco Tanzer, which Nils Neubert recited intermittently in German on Wednesday.

The flute line resembles that of a shakuhachi, and Ms. Han had to do most of the heavy lifting. Though the music itself is hackneyed and smacks of a travelogue, Ms. Han’s tone was campanilian and always interesting.

The viola part is really just an undercurrent of harmonics and dronelike scrapings, which left Ms. Gott to imitate Kabuki sounds by strangulating her strings, strumming like a guitar, plucking at the very highest end of the scale, and rubbing her strings with strips of paper, producing the always desirable kazoo effect. I take on faith that, if asked, she could also make her instrument sound like a harp.

When the piece was mercifully over, Mr. Neubert reread the entire poem in English. This despite excellent program notes which had included a translation of the text. Okay. We get it. Apparently that lady who attended the Kremer concert was unable to make it Wednesday afternoon, and so the applause was limited to about one-quarter of a smattering.

As often happens in pairings like this one, Beethoven emerged as the more revolutionary composer. “Rasumovsky Three” may receive short shrift in the hierarchy of his string quartets simply because it follows the two other masterpieces written for the composer’s patron, Count Andreas Rasumovsky, the ambassador of all the Russias to Vienna.

Actually the Quartet No. 9 in C major, Op. 59, No. 3, “Rasumovsky Three” is the least Russian of the three pieces; in the second, for example, Beethoven even includes a variant on a folk song later used by both Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky to express pure harmoniousness with the motherland. The third is more properly Germanic music. It is a stirring narrative that used to be referred to as the “Heroic” quartet, because of its similarity to the “Eroica” (although without the funeral march).

The quartet of David Coucheron and Min-Young Baik, violins; Luke Fleming, viola; and Jane Pae, cello, was coached by Guarneri violist Michael Tree. They delivered a very fine performance and, considering they do not play together as a unit on a regular basis, a superbly coordinated one.

This rendition actually began less than perfectly – the opening passages sounded tentative and unfocused – but once the Allegro vivace kicked in, this group was a marvel of dexterity and blending. Mr. Coucheron has a very beautiful tone, rare for a performer of his age (all four are hovering around the graduate student benchmark), and it was a pleasure to hear his exquisite phrasing.

Many players at this level can play fast, but struggle to pull off a delicate slow movement. Not so with this ensemble, which created a mysterious world of sound in the Andante. Ms. Pae, the youngest of the group, exhibited much raw power in her cello pizzicato, almost like a jazz bassist. In an ideal performance, she might dial it back just a little, but this rhythm was infectiously propulsive.

After a stately Minuet, the players threw themselves into a whirlwind Allegro molto that mimics the constant commencing of a fugue but always pulls back just at the precipice of complex counterpoint. It is one of Beethoven’s most exciting movements and was rendered as such. The crowd responded in kind.

In one concert we had journeyed from the ridiculous to the sublime.