Real Vocal String Quartet (RVSQ), consisting of violinists Irene Sazer and Alisa Rose, violist Dina Maccabee, and cellist Judith Ivry, is a classically-trained ensemble with an inventive capacity for jazz improvisation. Each member is also an accomplished vocalist, meaning that any selection they perform may involve not only their instruments but also singing, either solo or in close harmony. In preparing a repertoire for such extended resources, they have built up the background to perform just about any imaginable genre of music. Thus, when they were selected through audition by the State Department to represent current trends in American music on a tour that would cover Latvia, Lithuania, Azerbaijan, Macedonia, and Bosnia, they felt it appropriate to extend that repertoire with arrangements of songs from the countries they would be visiting. Yesterday evening at the Hotel Rex, they previewed the material they had prepared, along with selections from their new Four Little Sisters album, currently available for download from Amazon.com, as the featured performers in this month’s Salon concert presented by San Francisco Performances.

Listening to this group is an exhilarating experience, simply because one can never guess what they will do for their next selection. Each of the pieces learned for the tour demonstrated an understanding of the source material, but that material was then shaped around their improvisatory skills and the interleaving of voices and instruments. The same could be said of the album tracks they performed, “Allons Á Lafayette” (zydeco), “Falling Polka” (Swedish), “Elephant Dreams” (an original composition by Rose), and “Knotty Pine” (a song by David Byrne and David Longstreth). All of this was delivered with a minimum of patter, informative without being indulgent.

I first encountered RVSQ in May of 2011, when the alumni and students of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music took the initiative to organize Songs for Relief as a benefit concert for the victims of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The following October, as members of San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, they were featured performers at Chamber Music Day 2011. The group has built up an imaginative repertoire and an extraordinary knapsack of performing chops; and it is good to know that the State Department has selected this “local treasure” to represent the vanguard of American musical talent.