The Jerusalem Quartet — formed nearly 20 years ago when its members were matched up as teenagers at the Jerusalem Music Centre — has been to Ann Arbor twice before under University Musical Society auspices, in 2005 and 2007. Each time, its members wowed the crowd at Rackham Auditorium. That they looked young enough to still be teens was a trick: twenty-somethings, they played with old heads and with deep and dazzling musical artistry.

Time passes. It’s nearly 2011 now, the quartet is a regular in the world’s great halls, and they are the only artists to have won a BBC Music Magazine award twice — the first for their Shostakovich, the second for Haydn. And Kyril Zlotnikov, the group’s cellist, is married, has a baby boy and lives in Portugal.

“My wife is Portuguese,” he said from his home in Lisbon the other day, as he packed for the tour that brings the quartet back to Ann Arbor Thursday.

“I’ve been in Lisbon almost two years, and almost since then we’re not all in the same place.”

The group’s new violist, Ori Kam, for example, is in Israel for now, Zlotnikov said. But he was in the Berlin Philharmonic, and then, when he left there, he went to Geneva to teach. Meanwhile, the group’s former violist, Amihai Grosz, went to the Berlin Philharmonic as first principal viola.

All the moving about has affected the group’s schedule, Zlotnikov admitted, “but we just had to change it a little bit. We’ve been playing together since ’93, 17 years, and it’s better to be in same place so you can practice every day, but life is an unpredictable thing. Now everybody is in different locations, but nobody wants to stop playing in the quartet. It’s quite special we’ve been together for such a long time.”

And Zlotnbnikov is enthusiastic about Kam’s participation as the group sets out on its first tour with him.

“I thought that it would be very difficult and I was a bit afraid,” Zlotnikov said of the transition in personnel, “but from the first rehearsal I had the feeling I could go on stage and play with him.”

Quartets by Haydn have figured heavily in the Jerusalem’s recordings catalog, but that’s not reflected on the program the group plans for Ann Arbor. Two 19th century works, written 40 years apart — Mendelssohn’s E minor quartet (Op. 44, No. 2) and Brahms’ C minor quartet (Op. 51, No. 1) frame a 20th century work, Mark Kopytman’s String Quartet No. 3.

The age of the compositions doesn’t tell the story of the quartet’s acquaintance with the pieces. The Mendelssohn, for example, has been in the group’s repertoire for about two years, a much shorter time than the Kopytman.

“We’ve been playing it quite a few years already and we have been working with Mark a few times,” Zlotnikov said. “We perform a few pieces of his, not only this one.”

Born in 1929, in Ukraine in the former Soviet Union, Kopytman emigrated to Israel in the early 1970s.

“His piece that we’re playing was written in ’69, so you can imagine that he has a lot of influence of Shostakovich and Prokofiev and the like,” said Zlotnikov. “At that time these composers were very strong in the Soviet Union and worldwide, and even now you can feel that influence. This work has a lot of Jewish motifs, but at the same time a lot of contemporary mood. He is a very interesting composer. In a way, he is in the age of both the old school and the new school. As far as I can see, playing his pieces, some are very contemporary and this one is more moderate in the way of writing. He is one of the major composers in Israel, and we love to perform his music.

“We thought the Kopytman fit perfectly with these composers,” Zlotnikov continued, referring to Mendelssohn and Brahms. “It’s a very exciting piece; you will feel immediately this energy that will come.”

Susan Isaacs Nisbett is a free-lance writer who covers classical music and dance for AnnArbor.com.

Jerusalem Quartet performing Brahms String Quartet Op 51 n 2 I Allegro non troppo: