The Manhattan String Quartet, now resident at Colgate University, offered an intriguing lineup aboard Brooklyn’s Bargemusic on Sunday afternoon, linking three composers, each of whom led a fascinating life and each now seriously undervalued in America.

Charles Ives, an insurance man from Danbury, Connecticut, was a truly superior composer, and Americans were shocked when Arnold Schoenberg waxed rhapsodically about Ives’s genius upon coming to these shores in the 1930s. When awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Ives, ever the passionate individualist, rejected it, saying,”Prizes are for boys, and I’m all grown up.”

Ives wrote his String Quartet No. 1, presented Sunday, while still an undergraduate at Yale, learning from — or perhaps teaching — Horatio Parker about composition. The piece is an American original, filled with hymn tunes, marching band music, and an apple-cheeked spirit. The group (Eric Lewis and Calvin Wiersma, violins, John Dexter, viola, and Chris Finckel, cello) enunciated a reasonably accurate version, but there was quite a gap between the enthusiastic spoken introduction by Mr. Wiersma and the rather prosaic playing of his mates.

The folk music of what country inspired the main theme of the Israeli national anthem? If you answered Czechoslovakia — or Bohemia or the Czech Republic — citing your source as the famous theme from “The Moldau” by Bedrich Smetana, then you have a good ear. Your answer is excellent, albeit incorrect.

Hatikva is derived from a Swedish tune, discovered by Smetana in the 1850s when he was conductor in Goteborg. Smetana is one of those great composers who is not very well known outside his own land. Everyone has heard of “The Bartered Bride,” but how many have ever heard it in performance? And how many consider Smetana the second-best deaf composer in music history?

The chamber equivalent of the orchestral work that introduced the Moldau to the world is the quartet “From My Life.”There are two quartets with this soubriquet in the Smetana catalog, but the one played on Sunday is the more famous example. Unfortunately, it was not realized with anywhere near the requisite emotion.

We are lucky in New York to have groups from the Czech Republic stopping by on a regular basis. Any of them — the Skampa, Talich, Wihan, Prazak, or Panocha quartets — can whip up a frenzy of passion in this piece. But despite the obvious physical enthusiasm of these current fiddlers, the level of coloristic intensity was low in this overly gingerly rendition. The work begins with a white hot statement by the viola, but Mr. Dexter was content with the merely declarative. I’m sure these men are good teachers; the problem is that they play like academics.

The life of Erich Wolfgang Korngold contained melancholy of operatic proportions. A boy genius who never fulfilled his potential, an expatriate in a land of Philistines, a returning hero vilified in his own homeland, his most crushing disappointment was as a witness to the demise of his own art form. Growing up in the center of the most fruitful period in music history, this darling of the fin-de-siècle Austrian community was inflamed from early childhood with the stretching of the traditional bonds of harmonic theory. He experienced firsthand the heady premieres of the works of Mahler, Schoenberg and Strauss in the hotbed of musical revolution.

As he matured artistically, however, Korngold could not get past the haunting Viennese concept that his world was rapidly passing into oblivion (this is one of the themes of the film “King’s Row,” for which he wrote the score). His steadfast clinging to nostalgia at the expense of progress left him anachronistic, perfumed, and bitter (his character steps right out of “Der Rosenkavalier”).

Steven Beck joined for a run-through of Korngold’s Piano Quintet in E Major, an exercise that only proved the quartet was not particularly conversant with the Viennese idiom, either. Although it was refreshing to witness an ensemble genuinely ardent about its work, the net result belied the group’s own review of itself. Being in the midst of a performing group, after all, is the worst place to evaluate a concert intelligently.