MUSIC REVIEW : Pianist Watts in a Rare Chamber Concert

Not-too-imaginatively titled “Andre Watts and Friends,” the presentation began with the usually welcome strains of Schubert’s Trio in B-flat, in which the supervirtuoso pianist was joined by a pair of chamber pros, cellist Gary Hoffman and violinist Ani Kavafian, the latter an eleventh-hour replacement for Endre Balogh, who was variously reported as indisposed or no longer a Friend. If a prime requisite of successful chamber music presentation is interpretive agreement, the present reading might be counted a success. Otherwise, it was a trying 40-plus minutes, its high technical gloss notwithstanding.

This was cloying-sweet, rhythmically woozy (rubatos and luftpausen broad enough to accommodate an 18-wheeler) Schubert, with hokily exaggerated dynamics, patience-testingly slow tempos and a soft-focus sonority dictated perhaps as much by Watts’ soft-grained, unincisive Yamaha grand as his interpretive predilections.

Everything that followed was a vast improvement. First, clarinetist David Shifrin, with his honey-and-velvet tone, traced the gorgeous curves of Debussy’s First Rhapsody, with Watts--and his now-appropriately misty piano--as both sympathetic collaborator and affirmative co-star.

Subsequently, Watts and Georg Schenck, on a second Yamaha, offered a master class in two-piano virtuosity, elegance and dynamism via Saint-Saens’ “Beethoven” Variations, prior to delightedly whacking the living bejabbers out of Lutoslawski’s brief, sassy, very early (1941) and already very brilliant “Paganini” Variations.