Kennedy Center Chamber Players, January 10th, 2010.

First concert of the year last Sunday: the Kennedy Center Chamber Players with an all-Brahms program. Three string sonatas, one each for cello, viola and violin. In a word, excellent.

Cellist David Hardy opened with the E-minor sonata, Op. 38, which is possibly my favorite piece of chamber music, partly because it is so transparent. As great as much of Brahms's work is, a lot of it can be quite dense. So much goes on all at the same time, even when only two instruments are playing, that following the music takes real effort and can, in extreme cases, take away from the emotional enjoyment. Not so with Op. 38. Apparently written for a musician for whom cello was a secondary instrument, it is full of gorgeous melodies, unhurried, logical development, and interplay between the soloist and the accompanist that is immediately graspable but no less delightful for it. My reference version of the work is the recording Yo-Yo Ma did with Emmanuel Ax back in the mid-80s, but that's almost beside the point. Comparing a live performance to a recorded one is apples to oranges anyway, and is even more meaningless in this case because the early digital sound of the CD on my decidedly non-high-end system is so abrasive as to be downright unpleasant. If you are shocked at the idea of Yo-Yo Ma sounding scratchy, I would be happy to lend you the disc. Still, it does establish some kind of baseline, however low.

Hardy and pianist Lambert Orkis, who accompanied on all the works, sounded gorgeous, not only by comparison to the CD, but objectively. Their tempos were a bit more brisk than Ma and Ax's, but at the same time they managed to sound less metronomic, slowing down and stretching the beat just a little on the quieter sections. On the arrestingly beautiful main theme of the first movement, Hardy dug into the low strings with gusto and never let up. Orkis's accompaniment - typically of Brahms, he was really a co-soloist (Brahms even listed piano first when he published most of his sonatas) - was easy, confident, and never let itself be overshadowed by the cello.

Up next was the E-flat viola sonata which I had never heard before. The character of the work could not have been more different - it was full of Brahms's trademark density, but somehow managed to create a lighter mood, being neither dark nor melodramatic (the cello sonata, by contrast, is a bit of both). Violist Daniel Foster took a measured, analytical approach, and while I enjoyed hearing a new and interesting work, two days later I could not recall much about it; whether because it was unfamiliar music or because of Foster's detached approach, I do not know.

After the intermission, we were treated to Nurit Bar-Josef's rendition of the D-minor violin sonata. Bar-Josef, of course, is the National Symphony's principal, and as close as DC has to a violin superstar. She was fantastic - as much as I enjoyed the other two performances, she was on a different plane in terms of how much of herself she put into the music. Just her movement - she looked like she would start leaping about the stage any instant - betrayed her complete emotional dedication to the music. And the D-minor sonata is no picnic to play, either. The last of the three sonatas for the instrument Brahms wrote, it is the longest and the most complex. Probably because it is in a minor key, it is also my favorite. It is full of all kinds of stuff. In the opening movement, the jumps between high and low registers are so dramatic that sometimes it sounds as if a trio is playing. The entire work is full of Brahms' trademark baroque-like long eighth-note runs that he was so fond of using, especially in his late works. The last movement is marked Presto Agitato - enough said. Bar-Josef and Orkis took everything in stride but managed not gloss over anything. Or so I am remembering it now -- to be honest, I was too absorbed in the music to register many of the details. And that is exactly what you want from a first-rate live performance.