MUSIC

Zuill Bailey, Awadagin Pratt

To the eye, they were as different as A and Z: Fairfax native Zuill Bailey, cellist, with the shoulder-length hair of a 19th-century poet, dressed entirely in black; and Awadagin Pratt, dreadlocked pianist from Pittsburgh via Sierra Leonean ancestry, in a bright yellow patterned shirt.

But to the ear, they were as one -- a single sound of bowed and percussive components, balanced in unfailing beauty.

At the Barns at Wolf Trap on Friday night, the sound permeated Mendelssohn's "Variations Concertantes," Op. 17, as the instruments' inherent tonal contrasts blended smoothly.

For Shostakovich's Sonata for Cello and Piano in D Minor, Op. 40, the sound reflected the work's contrasts. In the heartfelt first movement, Bailey enfolded his 1693 Matteo Goffriller cello and played it lovingly. The grotesque dance of the second movement was a whirl of harmonics, pizzicati and complex bowing techniques. Well-matched intensity persisted through the dark third-movement meditation and the showy finale.

Estonian composer Arvo Part's "Mirror in the Mirror" dates to 1978 but bespoke much earlier times, its piano triads and extended cello line producing feelings of peace and tranquillity.

The performers' give-and-take was especially impressive in Brahms's Cello Sonata No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 38. Here the piano, which often dominates thematically, can easily overwhelm the cello, but Pratt was too musicianly (or too gentlemanly) for that. A and Z sounded not like opposites but -- as in the alphabet -- like two parts of the same totality.

-- Mark J. Estren

Quatuor Ebene

For a while during the Quatuor Ebene's concert with the duo of accordionist Vincent Peirani and saxophonist Vincent Le Quang on Saturday night, it seemed as though the quartet had fallen into the old strings-in-jazz trap, sawing away in docile, scripted accompaniment while the soloists made improvisatory sparks fly. But as the concert progressed, the Quatuor Ebene became more involved in the musicmaking, and by the end, the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium was jumping with the sound of a true partnership.

Not that the portions of the concert dominated by Peirani and Le Quang failed to impress; they're both fine exponents of a bluesy, somewhat abstract jazz that can nevertheless get pretty darn hot. Playing sans strings in Le Quang's "Untitled Suite," the duo modulated tempos relentlessly to produce energetic showers of notes before slowing down for a tender, songful melody. Le Quang's "D-flat Ballade" and "Still Song" featured searching, lyrical solos from sax and accordion, as deft effects in the strings heightened the mood.

Throughout the concert, cellist Raphael Merlin played the role of the jazz bass, anchoring the ensemble by plucking out harmonies, and first violin Pierre Colombet essayed occasional solos. But in "Un Baguette," a piece by violist Mathieu Herzog, Merlin's comping went from credible to incisive, and the quartet dug hard into its solo number, a witty, imaginative version of Miles Davis's "So What." In the two closing numbers, the standard "Nothing Personal" and Le Quang's "Little Russian Bus," Herzog strummed his viola like a banjo, Peirani slapped out shifty beats on the box of his accordion, and everyone got a chance to play, in both senses of the word.

-- Andrew Lindemann Malone