PERFORMING ARTS

Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra

If you're launching a jazz education program, there's no better friend to have than Wynton Marsalis. The acclaimed trumpeter may be the country's best-known jazz musician, and he's virtually a spokesman for the music itself. So it was fitting that Marsalis and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra inaugurated the new Capitol Jazz Project (a joint venture by the Washington Performing Arts Society and the D.C. public school system to support music in middle schools) with a program of traditional jazz at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall on Wednesday night.

Marsalis has caught a lot of flak over the years for his conservatism; he's notoriously disdainful of most jazz after 1960 (including late Coltrane, fusion and free jazz) and is often accused of merely popularizing the classics, instead of being a true innovator. Wednesday's concert seemed to bear that out: Marsalis and his 15-piece band played familiar works by Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, with some newer pieces by Marsalis himself and members of the group that stayed safely within traditional bounds.

And while the playing was superb -- this is a tightly knit ensemble that cuts through even the most complex music with jaw-dropping precision -- the evening felt distinctly tame and well-mannered, as if the band were gliding on well-worn tracks instead of channeling the spontaneous, risk-taking ferocity that makes jazz what it is. Rather than edge, there was elegance: Marsalis's shimmering, impressionistic take on the "Pollock" section of "Portrait in Seven Shades" (by the gifted reed player Ted Nash) was drop-dead gorgeous, and Joe Temperley's eloquent bass clarinet solo on Ellington's "The Single Petal of a Rose" won't soon be forgotten by anyone who heard it. The sold-out crowd gave Marsalis a standing ovation after the show closed with his fine, driving "Vitoria Suite."

-- Stephen Brookes

Embassy Series: Brahms Quintets

It's a rare treat to hear Brahms's Clarinet Quintet and Piano Quintet in the same evening. But on Wednesday the Embassy Series brought an ensemble of local musicians to the German Embassy to perform these pinnacles of the chamber music repertoire.

Although they share soaring melodic writing and heart-tugging harmonic shifts that are unmistakably Brahmsian, the quintets couldn't be more emotionally different. The Clarinet Quintet (played first on the program) is characteristic of the composer's late years -- suffused with nostalgia, melancholy and autumnal glow, its underlying heartache left unresolved in concluding bars that die away with a sigh. The mercurial Piano Quintet is much earlier Brahms, and it wears its often tempestuous emotions very much on the sleeve.

The performers found the right temperature for each piece and played both scores with a warmth and febrile intensity that suited this music. That said, there were instances of clunky phrasing and approximate ensemble that suggested less than ideal rehearsal time. I can't say I enjoyed the wiry string tone that violinist Peter Sirotin and violist Michael Stepniak produced -- or their uncomfortable lapses of intonation. But the embassy's dry acoustics didn't help them, and lent a clangorous edge to Ya-Ting Chang's highly charged piano playing. Clarinetist Suzanne M. Gekker, though overemphatic in some of her phrasing, caressed Brahms's writing with tone that was like a ribbon of caramel.

-- Joe Banno