The Montclaire String Quartet has been playing its way through its Sweet Season, thematically named concerts that match a certain candy with compositions that connect with it. So we've had M&Ms with composers whose surnames start with M, and English Toffee with British compositions. Saturday night it was Chocolate Kisses and music about love.

A bowl of candy of the thematic type has been at the ticket table. Saturday night's candy should have been a hint: The chocolate kisses were made of dark chocolate, and the bittersweet richness of the confection (count me as a major fan) fit the ensemble's choice of works by Janacek, Sibelius and Kreisler.

Janacek's String Quartet No. 2, "Intimate Letters," - finished 80 years ago this month - was written when the then-63-year-old composer was obsessing over his love for a woman nearly 40 years younger. He wrote more than 700 letters to her. Did I mention both were married? Not to each other.

The piece is full of brooding passion and intense shifts of mood that aptly paint a picture of the tortured affair.

Or it just sounds like Janacek, since all his music broods with passion and is full of intense shifts of mood.

Montclaire played it brilliantly.

Sandra Armstrong Groce's opening viola melodies (think of the viola as the young woman) had a delicacy of tone that became pervasive in the music's quieter sections. In the second movement, percolating ostinatos gamboled beneath expertly colored lyrical lines in Amelia Chan's violin and Andrea DiGregorio's cello.

Janacek scored the Moderato so the first violin plays high above the other three instruments. Chan played with searing focus here while the others reveled in their dark lines.

The finale sounds like formal arrhythmia. Bits of folk music flitted by, the violinist Luigi Peracchia got to pluck his instrument in nimble guitarlike strums, intense conversations erupted and ostinatos piled up and just as abruptly stopped under pointed melodies.

The Montclaire String Quartet has been playing its way through its Sweet Season, thematically named concerts that match a certain candy with compositions that connect with it. So we've had M&Ms with composers whose surnames start with M, and English Toffee with British compositions. Saturday night it was Chocolate Kisses and music about love.

A bowl of candy of the thematic type has been at the ticket table. Saturday night's candy should have been a hint: The chocolate kisses were made of dark chocolate, and the bittersweet richness of the confection (count me as a major fan) fit the ensemble's choice of works by Janacek, Sibelius and Kreisler.

Janacek's String Quartet No. 2, "Intimate Letters," - finished 80 years ago this month - was written when the then-63-year-old composer was obsessing over his love for a woman nearly 40 years younger. He wrote more than 700 letters to her. Did I mention both were married? Not to each other.

The piece is full of brooding passion and intense shifts of mood that aptly paint a picture of the tortured affair.

Or it just sounds like Janacek, since all his music broods with passion and is full of intense shifts of mood.

Montclaire played it brilliantly.

Sandra Armstrong Groce's opening viola melodies (think of the viola as the young woman) had a delicacy of tone that became pervasive in the music's quieter sections. In the second movement, percolating ostinatos gamboled beneath expertly colored lyrical lines in Amelia Chan's violin and Andrea DiGregorio's cello.

Janacek scored the Moderato so the first violin plays high above the other three instruments. Chan played with searing focus here while the others reveled in their dark lines.

The finale sounds like formal arrhythmia. Bits of folk music flitted by, the violinist Luigi Peracchia got to pluck his instrument in nimble guitarlike strums, intense conversations erupted and ostinatos piled up and just as abruptly stopped under pointed melodies.

It never quite reaches a convincing ending - Chan got to blaze away while the rest hammered down the last chords. But she had just a few more notes after everyone else quit.

Such is love?

Sibelius' D Minor Quartet (1908) has the name "Intimate Voices" but has no known story behind it. Montclaire played it winningly.

Sibelius wrote little chamber music; orchestral music was his focus. But much of his orchestra music has the conversational give-and-take of chamber music. So the D Minor sounds like orchestra music written small.

The spiritual core of the work is the fourth movement (of five). Here Peracchia and Armstrong Groce shaped fleet, liquid figures behind an extended dialogue in violin and cello.

Monclaire's deft textural features and clean intonation in many unison passages stood out.

Kreisler's "Leibeslied" featured Chan's dark, expressive tone. Kreisler's music - he wrote many encores for himself to play - has the surface beauty of good film music, but it can't hold a chocolate kiss to Janacek.

A smaller than usual crowd turned out at Kanawha Presbyterian Church.