Violinist Lefkowitz with sheet music, painter Schantz on stage, and violist Ludwig with bow. Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

Onstage in Gasson 100, propped on an artist’s easel, stands a blank white canvas about three feet high and five feet wide. Through the first half of an evening concert on April 11 by Boston College’s resident chamber group, the Hawthorne String Quartet, the brilliant rectangle has been a potent backdrop, first to Werner Thomas-Mifune’s contemporary piece Haydn’s Südamerikanische Saitensprünge, a lighthearted homage that mixes classical themes with sultry tango rhythms, and then to Mozart’s sublime String Quintet in G minor (for which the musicians were joined by Boston Symphony Orchestra violist Rebecca Gitter).

Now, at intermission, Jim Schantz, a Berkshires-based landscape artist, lays out seven pots of acrylic paint in colors from white to violet and readies a battery of housepainter’s brushes. For the concert’s second half, during which the musicians will play String Quartet (1921) by Hans Krása, Schantz will paint as the instrumentalists perform. Like the program thus far, Krása’s music uses humorous elements even as it charts the abysses of human experience. A native of Prague, the German-Jewish Krása enjoyed critical acclaim as a composer in Europe and North America before being deported, barely in his forties, to the Terezín concentration camp in 1942. The Third Reich had devised Terezín, in what is now the Czech Republic, as a propaganda showpiece and sent prominent Jewish artists, writers, and musicians there from around Europe, along with tens of thousands of others (peak camp population exceeded 55,000). Krása was a leading member of Terezín’s artistic community, and his children’s opera, Brundibár (Bumblebee), was featured in a Red Cross film designed to show the supposed quality of life in the camp. But Terezín served also as a transit camp to the Nazi death camps, and like most of his fellow artists, Krása met his death in Auschwitz, in 1944.

Hawthorne violist Mark Ludwig, violinists Ronan Lefkowitz and Si-Jing Huang, and cellist Sato Knudsen are all members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The quartet, founded in 1986, and in residence at Boston College since 1998, has an international reputation for championing the works of Krása and his compatriots in Terezín. Their collaboration with Schantz is rooted in Krása’s own fascination with dadaist and surrealist interplay between painting and music, and in the composer’s intentions for the piece.

In a conversation beforehand, Schantz explained how he prepared, by listening to a recording and even producing a small-scale study in his studio. He saw at once, he said, how the skyscapes he has been painting for some time might move further toward abstraction in response to Krása’s music. While he has collaborated with the Hawthorne Quartet before and has a game plan for the performance—“a sense of how much I want to accomplish with each movement”—he wants the work to be a unique reflection of the moment.

After intermission, Schantz steps onto the stage, dressed in black, like the musicians. While they tune, he gathers his brushes. With the opening note of the Quartet, he makes a bold horizontal crimson streak right to left across the canvas. Moving with almost balletic elegance, he covers at least two-thirds of the white field during the first movement, mainly in reds and oranges. In the more playful second movement, with its glissandi and experimental textures—made, for instance, by playing with the wooden side of the bow—the quick lateral gestures of Schantz’s arm and body as he applies his yellows are a counterpoint to the near-vertical passes of the violinists’ and violist’s bows. The elegiac opening of the final movement is accompanied by somber purple streaks in the top left corner, so that as the last whispering harmonic dies into silence, the effect is of an ominous sunset over a violet landscape.

Jane Whitehead is a writer based in the Boston area.

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