MUSIC REVIEWS : Brey and O’Riley Show Mastery at Beckman

Cellist Carter Brey and pianist Christopher O’Riley demonstrated the meaning of teamwork to an appreciative Coleman Concerts audience on Sunday in Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium.

The simplistic nonsense about chamber music being a certain multiple of minds rigorously working as one was intelligently refuted at every turn by these performers.

They do work together, and their interpretations are of a piece. But perish the thought of one docilely following the other.

When, in Prokofiev’s rather wan Sonata or in the sweaty heroics of Brahms’ Sonata in F, the piano nominally echoes a cello phrase (or vice versa), it is never a literal duplication with these two. Their employment of slight rhythmic or dynamic alterations in response to each other makes the listener understand why there are two instruments, of vastly differing timbres and capabilities, present in the first place.

Carter and O’Riley play together and off each other, with the kind of seeming spontaneity that is the result of arduous work.

But the aspect of labor is never obvious, not in Brey’s bright, light (perhaps too light for optimum effect in Brahms), focused tone--the cello is a singing, never a groaning instrument in his hands--or in O’Riley’s fluent, powerful pianism, an overly bright Steinway notwithstanding on this occasion.

Brey was the passionate baritone voice in Samuel Barber’s youthful, operatic Sonata, where the pianist is merely a backup voice. In Janacek’s exquisitely evocative “Pohadka” (A Fairy Tale), the pianist determines mood and pace, the cellist more often than not supplying a decorative obbligato.

The two pieces provide instructive, contrasting examples of chamber music division of duties, each participant readily able to command or obey, or the two acting in perfect harmony, according to the composer’s wishes.