Philadelphia Chamber Music Society presents Mozart’s violin sonatas

PCMS deserves credit for sheer scope and vision. The chamber-music setting need not be small on ideas, as this concert showed. And those ideas can marry intellectualism with old-fashioned musical enjoyment.

Their own starry evening

In devising the program, Denk had a vision of narrative structure. Mozart sonatas, he said in his pre-performance remarks, get short shrift in chamber recitals — often played first, as transition pieces to other artists and eras. The sonatas “deserve a starry evening all to themselves,” to borrow Denk’s words. And the half-dozen non-Mozart selections served to complement the great master, not to usurp him.

The program’s structure gave glimpses of Mozart’s influence on those who came after him. Often played without a pause, one work would flow into another in surprising ways. Take, for example, Mozart’s Sonata in A Major, K. 305, which transitioned without a beat into Four Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op. 7, a series of Webern miniatures.

Sonata symbiosis

Violinist and pianist work in true partnership in the sonata, a task that suited Denk and Pamela Frank well. By the time the theme and variation section resolved with a brilliant waltz, the two played as one with abandon. How interesting, then, to hear their careful, controlled approach to the Webern, in which the two instruments seemed to be in a constant state of agitation with each other.

Webern — like Mozart, an Austrian and a deeply influential musician — composed his Four Pieces 120 years after Mozart’s death. On paper, the work shares little with the K. 305 sonata. But taken together, one can recognize the musical progression of the composers’ shared homeland, from the lush, harmonic ebullience of the late 18th century to the jagged, fractured sound world of Expressionism. And one can fully hear the expectations of tempo and tonality that Mozart subverted in what seems otherwise a fairly traditional piece.

Prodigies past and present

The concert opened with the Sonata in C Major, K. 6, which Mozart composed at the age of seven. Perhaps it was appropriate that the youngest violinist on the program, Benjamin Beilman, performed the piece. At 29, he could still reasonably be called a prodigy and wunderkind, and both labels accurately describe his highly skillful style.

Although Mozart wrote better music as a tyke than most of us could hope to in our prime, K. 6 is still recognizably the work of a novice. Beilman and Denk treated it delicately, which served it well. Beilman played the Allegro lightly and airily, with beautiful legato phrasing. In the minuets, he intentionally sounded like a student learning for the first time, simultaneously projecting a sense of control and abandon.

These elements served both artists well in selections from Ravel’s Violin Sonata in G Major. Ravel was a brilliant pianist in his own right; it’s no surprise that his composition gives equal measure to the keyboard soloist. Denk played the two excerpted sections with melting lyricism.

Beilman is still a young artist — occasionally, he imbued a phrase with more flash than insight. So be it. I’m not sure anyone could bring much scholarship to the first movement of Adams’s repetitive, drippy Road Movies, which sounds like something that would play over a car chase in an action movie. Beilman and Denk made it exciting.

No encore needed

In terms of musicianship, acumen, and collaboration, Stefan Jackiw was the complete package. In selections from Handel’s Sonata in D Major, HWV 371, he balanced the forward-looking Affettuoso with the more traditional Allegro. And though he performed Mozart’s Sonata in G Major, K. 379, with almost surgical precision, his style never came across as rigidly academic.

Denk provided able support throughout. His sound is rich and round, befitting of a premier solo artist, but he never swamped his partners. Even as a sidekick, he found nuances in works by Schubert and Stravinsky that I’d never heard before.

Violinists love encores, but none of the three soloists offered any at the concert’s conclusion. And who needed them, when the printed program had so much to say?