On Wednesday (March 24), English cellist Steven Isserlis and Hungarian pianist Dénes Várjon gave a concert at Perimeter Institute.  It was fascinating to hear and compare four major sonatas in a broadly Romantic idiom, in one concert, rather than the usual eclectic mix of styles.  The program consisted of Samuel Barber's Opus 6 (1932); Frederyk Chopin's Opus 65 in G minor (1845-6), Robert Schumann's posthumous Violin Sonata No. 3 in A minor (1853), and Ernö Dohnányi's Opus 8 in B flat minor (1899).  Varjon's playing was excellent, reaching the tempest-tossed craggy heights peculiar to Romantic piano writing at appropriate times, but retaining a certain control and clarity, also a rounded percussiveness that I, probably deludedly, think of as particularly Hungarian (evinced in the piano music of Bartok, or the piano of Sandor Vegh).  Isserlis playing was superb, at times sublime.   His expressiveness, his mastery of phrasing and range of moods lit up music that in the hands of lesser players can seem a bit formless in those passages when the main melodies aren't singing out.  The Barber is a work I've not heard much, and would like to hear again.  This Chopin abounds in delightful, soulful melodies, the kind you recognize when you hear them and say to yourself "I've heard that before...so that's where it's from" but for some reason is not a piece I've sought out outside of concerts, to listen to over and over again.  This performance was the best I can recall, and I'm going to go out and find Isserlis' recording of it.  The slow movement was transcendent and sublime.

Another highlight was Isserlis' own transcription of a Schumann violin sonata.  The last two movements in particular had a lot of the folksy, happy, festival-of-song character that is particular to the brighter (but not necessarily less profound) side of Schumann's music.  Images popped into my head of Brahms staying with Clara and Robert at their country place in the Rhine valley, busts of Classical Greeks and Classical musicians decorating drawing rooms, making music subtly and equally infused with folk tunes and Classical elegance, to honor the muses of the gentle side of Romanticism, who dance, clad in long robes and garlanded with flowers, in verdant fields in paintings on the wall.  That kind of thing, but good.  (And no, I hadn't been smoking anything.)