If the New Hazlett Theater were a martini, it would be a very dry one. The San Francisco-based Alexander Quartet brought works from California and Vienna to the North Side performance space, closing out the Pittsburgh Chamber Music Society's "Bridges Festival" Monday night. Despite the New Hazlett's acoustic drawbacks, the quartet projected a sense of intimacy in this space that a more reverberatory venue may have lacked.

Served as an appetizer to the rest of the concert, the quartet presented three movements from "John's Book of Alleged Dances" by John Adams, 2008-09 Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra composer of the year. The quartet's stylistic approach to this work, relying on a clear, light tone and rhythmic precision, was convincing. They embraced the asymmetric rhythms, allowing those gestures to portray the dances without a lot of performance fussiness. The Hazlett's dry space embellished the intimacy of the quartet's performance of "Pavane: She's So Fine." Sandy Wilson's extreme-high cello register initiated this movement in a clear, sing-song-like voice, and Paul Yarbrough's viola brought Adams' movement to a compelling close.

The meat of the first half was Terry Riley's "Mythic Birds Waltz" and Wayne Peterson's "Jazz Play." The Alexander's lyricism for Riley's blues-meets-expressionism opening gave way to pensive glissandos, punctuated with a single pizzicato note. Once the ensemble attained the groove of Riley's Mozartian stylistic shifts, they were able to make sublime transitions from one section to another. Their realization of the final, truncated phrases of the opening material's return, portraying it as though it had never stopped playing beneath the surface of the other sections, was particularly strong. In Peterson's work, the ensemble projected the music through the Hazlett's dry space, playing above it with Bartokian intensity.

The second half was devoted entirely to Beethoven's Eighth Quartet. It took some time in the first movement for the ensemble to find this work's acoustic balance within the physical space. At times playing with a forced tone, the quartet was trying to squeeze every last ounce of reverberation from the Hazlett stage for Beethoven's dramatic rests. In the remaining movements, however, the quartet found their stylistic balance and gave the work a solid, austere rendition. In this work and the rest of the program, the Alexander Quartet was at its best with the execution of multiple and simultaneous musical ideas.