On paper it probably sounded so simple: a narrator reads from literature while a string quartet plays music suitable to the text. This type of concert fits in well with Princeton University Concerts’ aim to engage larger audiences in chamber music and emphasize the connections among art forms through interdisciplinary performance. But things are not always what they seem. What made last Friday night’s Princeton University Concerts presentation in Richardson Auditorium unique and not so simple was the caliber of performers engaged — the narration of Philip Roth’s Everyman was read by multiple Academy Award^®-winner Meryl Streep, accompanied by the renowned Takács String Quartet. This concert of simplicity became the event of the month to attend to open Princeton University Concerts 2014-15 season.

Ms. Streep is no stranger to Princeton; she has given at least one lecture on campus in recent history. The text Ms. Streep read as narration in this concert was a set of four scenes from Philip Roth’s novella Everyman, a literary meditation on death, the “common experience that terrifies all of us.” The Takács String Quartet provided a musical backdrop in the quartet music of contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, whose sparse, yet rich music perfectly matched the narration of loss and regret. Friday night’s performance was the second time this music and fiction had come together — the first performance of this combination was in 2007, with Philip Seymour Hoffman as narrator.

The Pärt-Roth pairing was divided into four parts, with the Takács playing a movement of music followed by Ms. Streep reading 20-25 pages of text. The opening sections of Pärt’s Fratres for string quartet were hymn-like, and easily depicted the cemetery scene with which Roth’s work opens. The members of the Takács String Quartet (violinists Edward Dusinberre and Károly Schranz, violist Geraldine Walther, and cellist András Fejér) kept the musical atmosphere dry, playing without vibrato but still staying very much in tune. A master of voice and character, Ms. Streep held the audience in rapt attention when reading the opening pages of Roth’s text.

The music of each section seemed to perfectly complement the subsequent text; the second Summa was musically more upbeat, as if walking away from the grave and onto the next thing in life and the third and fourth sections brought peaceful reflection into the mix. Pärt’s music, including the entire Fratres, the one-movement Summa and his Psalom for string quartet, was marked by a great deal of repetition, but with different colors among the instruments. Particularly sensitive were the sonorities between viola and cello and viola and second violin. Mr. Dusinberre’s first violin playing was darker than one might hear in Italianate music, and the overall effect from all four players well fit this musical commentary on death. Despite the lengthiness of some of Roth’s passages, the full house at Richardson Auditorium had no trouble staying with Ms. Streep’s captivating narration and spoken exploration of the characters in Roth’s writing.

The Takács String Quartet paired the multidisciplinary Pärt/Roth work with a piece seemingly on the same theme. Franz Schubert’s 1824 string quartet Death and the Maiden was considered Schubert’s testament to death. Closely related to an 1817 song Schubert composed of the same name, this four-movement work came about at a time of great personal struggle for Schubert, and contains the same graceful melodic style for which the composer was known. The Schubert quartet was a chance for the members of the Takács to play full out, and the piece was well in the ensemble’s wheelhouse. The overall musical character was more uplifting than Pärt’s chamber music, and the Takács ensemble took full advantage of the ample room for intensity within the music. Mr. Dusinberre’s delicate cadenza-like passage at the end of the first movement complemented well the unity in speed and transition from the others in the Takács Quartet. As one would expect from a significant Schubert work, the second movement “Andante” was songlike, even while in a minor key — homophonic and hymn-like, with collective unison in dynamics, as the musicians’ bows never seemed to leave the strings. Mr. Dusinberre demonstrated a particularly rich tone in the lower register of the first violin part, and the cello melody in the second variation of the theme was elegantly played by Mr. Fejér. The rollicking closing “Presto,” full of quick dotted rhythms, showed the uniformity of the Takács String Quartet which comes from years of playing together, bringing the high-powered evening to a close.