Bad news, good news in Old Lyme

Old Lyme - When Musical Masterworks springs a surprise on you, it's usually a win. Just walking in the door for a Masterworks chamber concert feels like a win.

At Saturday's concert, Artistic Director Edward Arron began by announcing that former artistic director (now referred to as "living legend emeritus") Charles Wadsworth had to postpone his scheduled return due to knee surgery. He was to be the pianist on two selections, so what to do?

One of the scheduled works was Schubert's Fantasie in F Minor for Piano Four Hands, and few pieces in the chamber repertoire are as emotionally searching and profound. But the solution was a snap. Arron himself delighted the audience in the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme by playing one of the touchstones of the literature: Bach's Suite No. 1 in G Major for Unaccompanied Cello.

And Wadsworth was to pair in a cello transcription of Schubert's song "An die musik" with Arron. Not a problem … Arron simply turned to his wife, pianist Jeewon Park, who performed a ravishing Impromptu No. 3 in G Flat Major from Schubert's Op. 90.

The program will be performed again today at 3 p.m.

Arron apologized for hogging the stage with his solo Bach - "My job is to bring my friends and show them off" - but the audience was rapt as he played the six-movement suite with the lightness of bow and fleetness of focus that this first suite calls for. Only when he reached the penultimate minuet and then the gigue did he let loose, stamping his feet as he danced along in place.

For her impromptu Schubert, Park turned back the clock with an interpretive approach that let her luxuriate in its operatic, emotive melody. As did pianists a century ago, she at time desynchronized her hands, revealing new voices and weaving an almost vocal legato line. And, dressed in a gold sequined gown, she looked fabulous doing it.

Joining the husband and wife was violinist Yosuke Kawasaki, a compact, powerful-looking man with a big powerful sound. Kawasaki and Park made heads spin when they followed the divine logic and beauty of Arron's Bach with an earthy, guttural reading of Bartok's Rhapsody No. 1 for Violin and Piano.

Kawasaki attacked the opening, howling stops, over Park's percussive dissonance, and never let up. He surveyed all of Bartok's still-strange and exciting bowing techniques, his mane of hair hanging over his face, like some force of nature. The opening movement's second theme allowed him to spin a long-lined, lovely serenade over metric oddities in the piano, and Kawasaki and Park shook the hall with wild dances, often chasing each other musically, in the second movement.

The three musicians joined to close the program with a high-voltage performance of Smetana's Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 15. Written after the death of the composer's 4-year-old daughter, all three movements are resolutely rooted in G minor, and the sorrow, angst and sentimentality never gives way to elegance or reason. The Bohemian composer wrote this from the guts, and the trio Saturday, took each moment - both the explosive grief and the angelic hymns - to the max. This is a piece that opens overwrought - and stays there.

The work opened with full-bore grief of the active variety, and the give-and-take between the paired strings and Park felt like body blows. From the allegro central movement on, the piece takes decidedly Schumann-esque guise, and Kawasaki was especially effective in the hesitant lyrical theme that bloomed across the trio.

The final presto, carried forward by Park again and again, moved from a jittery dance to a beautiful ballade in a seeming sonata form. The trio moved through a series of dance rhythms and false codas before the lyrical ballade bloomed into a grand, majestic theme to close.