MUSIC

The second work the Phillips has commissioned from Mandel in the last two years, this 20-minute piece is a set of 13 miniatures, each based on a painting in the collection. Mandel's writing here is neither a literal attempt to describe canvases by, say, Calder, Kandinsky or Rothko in music, nor a pastiche based on the artists' periods or countries of origin. Instead, an objective, all-purpose modernism -- clusters of dissonance, angular melodies, virtuosic polyrhythms, clouds of Messiaen-like color, percussive bursts of energy -- serves to categorize most of the paintings. It's all expertly composed, but (at least upon a single hearing) there seems to be too little contrast in content or mood in these depictions of wildly disparate paintings.

A sensitively shaped yet vividly emotive performance of Schumann's rhapsodic Fantasie in C, Op. 17, and a warm reading of 20th-century American composer Elie Siegmeister's bluesy and genial (if ultimately unmemorable) "Sunday in Brooklyn" completed the program.

-- Joe Banno

Andrew Manze and Richard Egarr

Violinist Andrew Manze and keyboardist Richard Egarr spoke entertainingly from the stage of the Gildenhorn Recital Hall about the instruments they played Sunday night during their concert at the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. Both instruments perfectly suited the program of Mozart and Schubert sonatas; Manze's "unmodernized original" violin dated from 1782 and had a thinner, scratchier tone than today's violins, while Egarr played a copy of an 1800 fortepiano that had a tangy cimbalomesque tone.

Happily, Manze and Egarr also performed the music in period style: like two guys having fun, entertaining themselves and a bunch of (paying) friends. They knew the music cold but still took risks, choosing quick tempos that never sounded rushed, playing with phrasing to emphasize surprises and climaxes, and exploring the extremes of the tone colors their instruments could produce.

The duo didn't short the graceful charm of the two smaller-scale sonatas on the program -- Mozart's Sonata in F, K. 376, and Schubert's Sonata in D, D. 384 -- but also gave them a delicious spontaneity. And Mozart's Sonata in A, K. 526, became a dynamo, with broad strokes in the opening movement and a scintillating perpetual-motion finale.

Mozart's Sonata in E-flat, K. 481, received a performance that supported Manze's description of it as an unknown masterpiece. In the glorious Adagio, which repeatedly turns toward tragedy before recovering its equipoise, they took a relatively fast tempo but found new worlds of expression in exquisitely shaded tone colors and lyrical feeling. They also sharply characterized each of the variations in the wonderfully wide-ranging finale, including a false ending so convincing that a few audience members started clapping during an extended pause.

-- Andrew Lindemann Malone