Revolution in reverse, under cool Vt. skies

Yellow Barn, which concludes its summer with three concerts this weekend, was founded four decades ago by the New York cellist David Wells, and it’s currently under the artistic directorship of Seth Knopp, the pianist of the Peabody Trio. I asked one string player in his fourth year what kept him coming back, and his answer was simple: programming. That’s what initially caught my eye, as well.

Knopp has a gift for building concerts that stroll cheerfully across the centuries, and it’s as if he never got the memo that contemporary music is supposed to be box-office poison. At Yellow Barn, gnarly avant-garde works are taken out of chilly isolation and invited to mingle with feel-good blockbusters of Romantic chamber music. And as demonstrated by Tuesday’s program, both parties seem to benefit from each other’s presence.

This particular concert offered a bit of musical revolution in reverse, opening with Helmut Lachenmann’s “Trio Fluido,’’ a daunting work from 1966-67 that would typically be the province of crack new-music groups, and ending with Brahms’ sumptuous G-major String Quintet, a cornerstone of the mainstream chamber music literature. Of crucial importance is that Yellow Barn has apparently earned the basic trust of its audiences, who seem to arrive ready and eager to hear at least some music that they do not already know. How else to explain the rapt silence with which this crowd listened as clarinetist Alicia Lee, violist Sophie Heaton, and percussionist Ian Antonio plunged into Lachenmann’s work, full of sharp-edged instrumental banter played out in a rush of what can seem like dissociated jabs, rustles, shrieks, and sighs. The musicians wrestled valiantly with this brutally challenging score.

And of course, the entirety of an evening’s program is present even when the works are silently awaiting their turn. In that spirit, knowing that the Brahms Quintet was hovering just beyond intermission encouraged one to listen for the distant Romantic echoes that can still be heard in Lachenmann’s music despite his audacious attempts to sever ties to music’s past.