Mr. Tetzlaff and his colleague, both Germans, suit this music well. Absent is the Rolls-Roycean weight and gleam with which any number of Russian-Romantic violin virtuosos might have smothered this light-footed music into extinction. The approach here was tight, clean and free of excess rhetoric. Mr. Lonquich was absolutely first rate: a pianist of great energy, with a sound sense of style and technique enough to manage young Beethoven’s racing, rippling dipsy doodle.

And their playing of the Brahms Quartet in A minor (op. 51, no. 2) – itself a study in extraordinary contrasts – showed their finest qualities in generous measure. While they permitted themselves just a gradual change of mood as the sensuous second theme of the first movement invaded our consciousness, they found a rare serenity in the main part of the second movement, and their ‘quasi Minuetto’ was played not so much as a dance but as a trance-like sequence of stillness and agitation.

They play at the Y on Thursday night.

Mr. Harburg, who is probably best known for creating “Over the Rainbow” with Harold Arlen, spoke often before his death in 1981 about the dignity of the fellow asking for a dime.

This “was not a self-pitying breast-beater begging for a handout, but a man proud of what his hands had contributed to the wealth of this country,” he said at the 92nd Street Y in 1970. The man’s statement, he said, boiled down to, “I produce; why don’t I share?”

The Y shares many American song classics in the long-running Lyrics & Lyricists series.