Music Reviews : Kohns Play Program of 20th-Century Classics

Margaret and Karl Kohn have been a two-piano duo for at least three decades, achieving by now a team longevity rivaling that of the happily remembered Luboshutz & Nemenoff or Vronsky & Babin, and easily exceeding that of Guy Maier & Lee Pattison, who were together only 15 years.

The Kohns have made their mark in another part of the musical forest than their predecessors, however. As specialists in music of their own century, the veteran musicians have usually played to a more limited, if possibly more discriminating, audience.

Such an audience gathered in Bing Theater at the County Museum of Art for the latest Monday Evening Concert, and heard polished, vigorous performances of Anton Webern”s two-piano transcription of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 16, Stravinsky’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Bela Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1942).

Elegance and understatement are hardly the qualities one expects at the Monday Evening series, these days or ever, yet those were the very elements most often projected in these clarified performances.

Bartok’s complex but touching quartet for percussionists and pianos seldom receives so comprehensive a performance as the Kohns, with Theresa Dimond and Mark Nicolay, accomplished.

Overpolish was the threatened danger in Stravinsky’s 1935 Sonata. This time around, the two pianists seemed to have internalized the work’s difficulties to the point where its actual mordancy has been smoothed down: Both its bark and its bite now seem muted.

Webern’s clever arrangements of Schoenberg’s economical Five Pieces proved another example of boldness becoming blandness through overtactful translation.