By Tuesday afternoon, the roads were negotiable, the ramparts of snow lining Broadway had clearly delineated footpaths trampled through them and a sizable crowd was able to find its way to the Merkin Concert Hall to hear a bright, lively, appropriately titled group called CELLO play through a program of classics and jazz.

Merkin Hall is a jewel—a sort of musical hideaway just around the corner from Lincoln Center—and its long-established Tuesday afternoon concert series may be highly recommended. CELLO—four young cellists who trade off everything from playing lead to presenting the spoken introductions to their pieces—brought just the right combination of concertration and informality to the afternoon.

The four—Maria Kitsopoulos, Laur Koehl, Maureen McDermott, and Caryl Paiser—are all virtuosos and yet they differ enough in their temperament and in their approaches to their instrument that there is nothing “samey” about their collective sound. They listen to one another, react to one another, compliment one another.

The program began with Charlie Bisharat's What Friends Are For—a lively, contrapuntal workout not to be confused with Dionne Warwick's mawkish jukebox horror. An arrangement of Bach's Sarabande from the Cello Suite No. 6 sounded like a rediscovered movement from a late Beethoven string quartet while selections by Vivaldi and Boccherini called to mind the gloriously overblown baroque arrangements of Leopold Stokowski.

CELLO approached Samuel Barber's Adagio For Strings in a brisk, dry-eyed and rather deadpan manner; while this ensured there would be no lapse into soggy sentimentality, it also tended to sap the languorous intensity that can make this work such a mind-wrenching experience.

The jazz selections were toe-tapping pleasantries rather than wild bacchanals—still, McDermott and Kitsopoulos can slap, strum and swing a cello with the best of them. Highlights included Jeff Beal's Six Mile Creek, Ron Carter's Loose Change, Miles Davis' So What and George Thatcher's Suite For Transient Minds. The last of these was saddled with an unfortunate literal “explanation”: The composer went to Africa, then came back to New York, then put his experience into music. It would have been impossible to have figured this subtext out from the music and the attempt to sort it all out (“Aha! That passage must represent going through customs!”) rather got in the way of one's simple enjoyment of a simple and enjoyable score.

—New York Newsday