Five years ago last week, Canadian violinist Martin Beaver received a job offer that many young classical musicians would kill for. He had to think it over.

Beaver was invited to become the new first violinist of the Tokyo String Quartet, one of the world's leading chamber ensembles. Since its founding in the late 1960s, the group has produced more than 40 recordings and received seven Grammy nominations.

When he was offered the job, Beaver, then 34, knew of the good things that would come with it -- the performances in great concert halls in New York, Vienna and London, the recordings, the chance to explore masterpieces with three musicians who knew the repertoire profoundly.

The quartet presents more than 100 concerts a year, and when they aren't on the road, the musicians teach at Yale University's School of Music.

At the time of the offer, Beaver was a soloist and occasional chamber musician and was teaching at Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory. He had performed with orchestras across Canada and the U.S., and had won prizes at the Indianapolis and Queen Elisabeth of Belgium competitions. Taking a job with the Tokyo Quartet, he knew, would reduce the number of other engagements he could accept.

"I knew it would be a huge time commitment, and I had some concerns about closing off pretty much all other artistic outlets in my life to focus on this one," Beaver said recently from his home north of New York City. "But I also knew that if I said no, I would probably spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened."

Beaver, who will perform with the group at Ottawa's Dominion-Chalmers Church Wednesday in music by Beethoven, Schumann and Haydn, says he decided to join the quartet based partly on the connection he felt when he tried out for the job in New York City in early 2002. Over two days, he played through repertoire with violinist Kikuei Ikeda, violist Kazuhide Isomura (the group's only remaining original member) and British cellist Clive Greensmith.

"I felt there was definitely something that had the potential to work well, and I had the general feeling that aside from being wonderful players, these guys were all pretty decent people. I felt enough in common with them on several levels," says Beaver, now 39.

More than a few ensembles have broken up because of conflicts. Spending weeks on the road with the same three people, Beaver says with a laugh, "is like a four-way marriage, without the sex. It's a cliche, but it's true."

"To join a group that's been around for more than 30 years, you want to retain the traditions but at the same time express yourself as a musician within the quartet and make a difference to the interpretations. It's a delicate thing, but it's been really great. It's been very intense, but extremely rewarding."

"I had some knowledge of the quartet repertoire, but I hadn't been in a full-time quartet. It was challenging to learn the pieces and assimilate them quickly, both musically and technically. It made it easier that my colleagues knew the repertoire inside out, and they tried to arrange things so that my first year wasn't overwhelmingly onerous. That was a great help," says Beaver, who grew up in Winnipeg and Hamilton and studied at Indiana University.

Not long after that, the quartet performed at New York's Carnegie Hall. It was Beaver's first performance there, and he says he'll always remember it. For one piece, the group performed Mozart with the great Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha.

"We played in this great hall to lots of people, and that's a particularly wonderful memory. I thought, 'I could get used to this,'" Beaver recalls.

His most recent tours were typical. Last weekend, he returned home to his wife, Mana, and their two daughters, aged six and 11, following a European tour that included 11 cities in 17 days. There were concerts in Madrid, Paris, Vienna, Florence, Cologne, Brussels and the Netherlands. That tour started just six days after the group had returned from a three-week tour of Japan and Korea.

"The two tours combined to make it feel gruelling. But we all feel we would rather do as much as we can in a short space of time so that we can have more time at home if possible. Before joining the group, I had never toured on this kind of scale, and that took getting used to. "

Beaver says the musicians get along well in their long hours together in airports, hotel lobbies and concert halls, but he says he has learned to sense when he or his fellow musicians need quiet time on their own.

"I came to understand how musicians will guard their privacy on a tour. Sometimes we will go out for dinner together after a concert, and that's great, but sometimes, when you're tired, you just want to be alone, and I've learned how to sense that. You can naturally grate on each other occasionally when you're with the same people for so long."

Being part of the Tokyo Quartet gave Beaver another problem that a lot of musicians would love to have: He had to learn how to play the $2-million-plus Strad that came with the job. When he joined the group, Beaver had been playing a Guarneri that he had won on a three-year loan from the instrument bank of the Canada Council for the Arts.

The members of the Tokyo Quartet perform on the "Paganini Quartet," a group of Strads named for the 19th-century Italian violinist and composer who owned and played them. The instruments have been on loan to the quartet from the Nippon Music Foundation since 1995.

Beaver says he played the Guarneri for the first few months with the group because it was familiar, but a few months later he started playing the Strad, which dates from 1727. Beaver says Paganini used to refer to it as the elephant, because "it's quite large physically and it has a particularly rich lower register. I love it, but it took me a while to get used to it."

An all-Beethoven CD for the Harmonia Mundi label last year received some rave reviews. The disc includes the String Quartet No. 9 in C major, Op. 59. no. 3, which the group will perform in Ottawa Wednesday, along with Haydn's String Quartet in D minor, opus 76, no. 2 and Schumann's String Quartet in F major, opus 41, no. 2.

A New York Times critic, reviewing a concert by the quartet last fall, praised the performance as "a passionate, richly toned discussion among intelligent, charismatic equals," and an "expressively phrased conversation of burnished grace and vigour."

"And when we revisit repertoire, it's interesting to see the developments that have taken place since I joined, the influence of other works we've played. The time we've spent together definitely contributes to a deeper understanding."

Wednesday's concert is part of the winter concert series presented by the Ottawa Chamber Music Society and programmed by Julian Armour, who resigned as artistic director of the organization March 5, citing major differences with the society's board.

Beaver, who performed at the summer festival long before joining the Tokyo Quartet, says he was shocked to hear of Armour's resignation. He says he hopes the talks that Armour and the board have begun with a mediator will produce a solution and bring Armour back to the organization.

"It's hard to imagine the festival without Julian. He has been the guiding force and the light behind the whole thing. He's never been concerned about just putting on a lot of concerts, but the best concerts possible and also creating a wonderful forum for Canadian composers. It's been a great thing for Ottawa and for Canada, and I hope things can be worked out."

The Ottawa Chamber Music Society presents the Tokyo String Quartet Wednesday at Dominion-Chalmers Church. Tickets & times, 613-755-1111 or www.chamberfest.com.

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