MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : Musicians From Marlboro Shine at the Biltmore

The latest edition of Musicians from Marlboro breezed into the Biltmore Hotel’s Crystal Ballroom on Wednesday and blew away the sizable Chamber Music in Historic Sites audience with a cannily crafted program that mixed esoterica by Mahler and Beethoven with unhackneyed marvels by Mozart and Dvorak.

The seasonally changing Marlboro ensembles, comprising musicians who have participated in the Vermont summer academy- cum -festival, have provided valuable showcases for tomorrow’s chamber music luminaries. On Wednesday, it took no remarkable prescience to assess the winning talents of two of the young participants: Beijing-born violinist Zhen-Rong Wang and Moscow-born pianist Ignat Solzhenitsyn (Aleksandr’s son).

Wang’s rhythmically vital, immaculately tuned playing propelled an elegant, sensitively balanced reading of the Mozart Quintet in E flat, K. 407, with an old pro, David Jolley, the commanding horn soloist.

Solzhenitsyn provided the powerful, darkly beating heart, sharing honors with veteran violinist Isidore Cohen, late of the Beaux Arts Trio, for the agonies of Mahler’s Piano Quartet movement, the student composer’s brief, unsettling excursion into the world of Gallicized Wagner.

Whereupon Solzhenitsyn switched direction and style with astonishing naturalness, from Romantic thunder to Classical dispatch, with a tautly inflected, dashing performance of the 16-year-old Beethoven’s unaccountably neglected C-major Piano Quartet. The full string ensemble--Wang, Cohen, violists Daniel Foster and Carla-Maria Rodrigues and cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras--provided the rousing finale, Dvorak’s delectably folksy Opus 97 Quintet.