An old favorite and an impressive novelty highlighted the Longy Spring Festival's final program last Thursday night. As usual, there should have been a much larger audience, for these concerts have been exceptional in both material and performance.

Playing the Franck F minor Quintet is bound to be risky. The work is so familiar to most chamber music enthusiasts that they can detect even the slightest mistakes. But Gregory Tucker and the Stradivarius Quartet gave a performance that came close to perfection in both technique and interpretation. The group wisely stressed the score's broad outlines, and lightly passed over some of its more distressing chromatic sections. The only real flaws were some late entrances by violinists Wolfe Wolfinsohn and Harry Kobialka, but these were fortunately infrequent.

Theodore Chanler's musical settings of eight epitaphs ranged from triteness to imaginative poignancy. Best of the lot were Ann Poverty and Be Very Quiet Now, terse expressions of complete resignation. Chanler, formerly a teacher at Longy, has an eclectic style that echoes everyone from Faure to Copland. He excels in simple melodic and harmonic patterns, but when he tries to be more elaborate the outcome is not always successful. Paul Matthen sang with restraint and delicacy, accompanied by the always competent Mr. Tucker.

The same two artists had earlier presented seven songs by Hugo Wolf. No world-shaking masterpieces, the songs are interesting examples of what Wolf believed the lied should be--a union of the voice and the piano. This he achieved at the expense of the melodic line, and the result is frequently more important dramatically than musically.

Also on the program was Beethoven's justifiably neglected Trio in E flat. I found nothing at all distinctive in the work, and the rather routine performance it received did not help matters any. Still, it came at the beginning of the program, and there were enough good things later on to make up for it.