PERFORMING ARTS

-- Charles T. Downey

Kennedy Center Chamber Players

Recipe for an exemplary Kennedy Center Chamber Players concert: Take two upbeat works written by famed symphonists experimenting with sonority and balance before writing their first symphonies. Add one mature, darker piece. Season impeccably. Warmly serves several hundred.

That was Sunday afternoon's musical feast at the Terrace Theater. Pianist Lambert Orkis, violinist Nurit Bar-Josef and cellist David Hardy brought lovely ensemble work to Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 1. The 17-year-old composer was less harmonically daring here than he would later become, and sunnier and sweeter -- he wrote the work for an inamorata. The players neatly contrasted the drawn-out themes with the more intense ones, with Hardy's cello especially songful.

For Beethoven's early Serenade for String Trio, Bar-Josef and Hardy were joined by violist Daniel Foster, whose elegant playing matched theirs. This is not great Beethoven, but the players made it great fun, from the opening and closing march (a bow to the days when performers would walk in, play, then walk out) to the Falstaffian cello outbursts in the Scherzo, the drone bass in the jaunty Allegretto alla Polacca, and the final variations -- which are strongly redolent of Mozart.

So much for the appetizers. The main course was more Shostakovich -- his Piano Quintet, for which violinist Natasha Bogachek joined the group. This is a big work with substantial contrasts. For instance, the lovely fade-out of the Adagio is followed by a rough-hewn, parodistic and rather crude Scherzo. The quintet was played both well and thoughtfully, its tension-releasing finale having just enough burlesque about it to serve as a piquant dessert.

-- Mark J. Estren

Time for Three

According to conventional wisdom, classical musicians just cannot get funky. Ask the average string ensemble to improvise on a blues riff, and the results are likely to be comically stilted -- an embarrassment to everyone concerned.

But as the genre-busting trio Time for Three proved Sunday night at the Kennedy Center, it doesn't have to be that way. Trained to within an inch of their lives at the Curtis Institute of Music, the trio -- Zachary DePue and Nicolas Kendall on violins, with Ranaan Meyer on double bass -- have turned their sights on everything from jazz to Gypsy melodies, and the results are spectacular. Combining the polished virtuosity of the classical world with the raw energy of a bluegrass fiddle festival, they brought the house down with the blistering pyrotechnics of "Wyoming 307" and "Forget About It" (two jazzy pieces by bassist Meyer) and the haunting, hymnlike "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen. There was nothing stilted about any of it; this was high-octane playing from first note to last.

The concert was, in fact, a celebration of the fifth anniversary of the Kennedy Center's laudable Conservatory Project, and 14 players from music schools across the country followed the trio onstage for Aaron Copland's classic "Appalachian Spring." The gifted 21-year-old conductor Teddy Abrams led the group in a luminous, detailed performance; it was clear he knew exactly what he was going for, and he turned in a precise and always engaging reading. But the most fun came when Time for Three joined the conservatory players, closing the evening with a performance of Meyer's freewheeling "American Suite" that brought the audience to its feet.

-- Stephen Brookes