THIS lovely debut feature by producer/writer/director Yaron Zilberman didn’t get a nomination for the recent Academy Awards.

Nor should it have. Too good for box-office-driven competition, brilliantly credible, every element of its creation offers deep satisfactions.

For 25 years, four talented string players have performed together. The patriarch is cellist Peter (Christopher Walken unlike any previous role). First violin is Daniel (Mark Ivanir). Second violin Robert (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and viola Juliette (Catherine Keener) are parents of promising 24-year-old violinist Alexandria (Imogen Poots).

“Performance” studies those five people – growth as performers, domestic and professional relationships, emotional issues. Its catalyst is Peter’s recently-confirmed Parkinson’s disease, a terrible anguish for a player whose art is in the fingers of his left hand.

That dark destiny is one of two constants underlying Robert’s yearning to change chairs with Daniel, Juliette and Alexandria’s falling out over the latter’s affair with Daniel and Juliette’s fury at waking one morning and smelling another woman on Robert’s body. The other is Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14, Opus 131, which the quartet is booked to perform. With no intervals separating its seven movements, it challenges the players both physically and artistically.

Zilberman’s emotionally powerful film delivers major satisfactions as it ranges across a wide cultural spectrum. The screenplay is structurally robust, with dialogue betokening a masterful writer’s ear.

At Palace Electric and Capitol 6