MUSIC & DANCE REVIEWS : Harrell, Bronfman Offer Versatile Sonata Recital

The room was too large, the program in moments too intimate, the lighting, as always, Kafkaesque: Under the glare of dead-white overhead lamps, the performers looked more like victims of interrogation than artists at work.

And still, the sonata recital in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center by cellist Lynn Harrell and one of his longtime collaborators, pianist Yefim Bronfman, Sunday night, turned out to be one of the happier recent occasions in that 3,000-seat-plus hall.

Credit the kaleidoscopic virtuosity of the two protagonists, the canny construction of their poetic/powerhouse program and all the variety--emotional, dynamic and thoughtful--they brought to it.

And credit Beethoven, Schubert and Rachmaninoff, whose respective, large-boned Sonatas in C (Opus 102, No. 1), A minor (“Arpeggione”) and G minor, Harrell/Bronfman outlined, articulated, caressed and re-created with manifest affection and authority.

True partners, the American musicians play together with a mellow sense of ensemble anchored in apparently assertive, driving personalities and wide-ranging technical resources. Only good taste and imagination--in both of which they are abundant--can limit their interpretive choices.

Their Beethoven and Schubert performances reclaimed the quirkiness, repose and directness in those two works, each sonata building to its cumulative conclusion through unfussy statements achieved with effortless means. Yet, within tight constructs, these readings had a sense of spontaneity.

Rachmaninoff’s massive and trap-filled G-minor Sonata made the largest virtuosic demands in this program, demands the duo met cheerfully and with a passion and rhetoric never overstated. When it was over, they betrayed no relief, only pleasure.

In response to long and noisy approbation from their audience, Harrell and Bronfman offered two encores: the Largo from Chopin’s Sonata, and the Allegro scherzando from Mendelssohn’s Second Sonata.