David Kim and Juliette Kang at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society

The program featured a mixture of European ethnicities, including French, Russian, Spanish, and Viennese composers. Although they were post-romantic, and in the case of Leclair pre-classical, the composers shared a predilection for sentimentality. The three musicians made the most of the expressive nature of the compositions. Strengthened by the clarity, coordination, and virtuosity of their playing, their mature sense of emotionality and musical dialogue made for an enriching evening of music from the violin repertoire.

Jean-Marie Leclair was a late baroque composer whose Sonata for Two Violins nevertheless echoes the French theater of the time, exemplified by Molière, Racine, and Corneille, which, while in the classical idiom, brought human passions to the fore. Beginning with stretches of long, extended, whole notes, the sonata evolves into contrapuntal dialogues between the two violins. Kim and Kang brought out an underlying feeling of romantic intrigue that pervades the work.

Milhaud’s Sonata for Two Violins and Piano is a late-impressionist piece that anticipates Milhaud’s later modernism in some of its melodic and harmonic structure. The interplay among the piano and two violins is conversational and magical. The piece, which shows a lightness characteristic of the impressionist period, makes ample use of the pentatonic scale. Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck studied with Milhaud, and there are hints of the polytonality that Brubeck would incorporate into his playing and which he learned from Milhaud, who himself later became interested in jazz when he relocated to America. The piece is pervaded by a feeling akin to the Degas paintings of groups of ballet dancers in interaction and has a similar off-center displacement. Kim, Kang, and Zhu comingled their playing with the relaxed rapport that is called for by this piece.

Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins contains some of the composer’s troubled moodiness, balanced by satisfaction and quiet contentment. The influence of Russian melodic twists stands out from the beginning, and the composer enjoys having the two violins mix it up, highlighting the sonorities of the instruments, one of his great strengths as a composer. Kim and Kang took up the technical challenges of the piece with great aplomb, a foretaste of the virtuosic challenges that were to follow.

Rodrigo’s Capriccio for Solo Violin is a romantic tour de force by a 20th-century composer who diligently preserved the Spanish musical heritage. His Concerto de Aranjuez is one of the peaks of the Spanish guitar repertoire, and, like Milhaud, Roderigo had a major impact on jazz, in his case through Miles Davis’s and Gil Evans’s Sketches of Spain. The capriccio, dedicated to the great Spanish violinist and composer, Pablo de Sarasate, is a monumental solo that challenges the violinist in every way. Kang proved to be entirely up to the task, not only negotiating the most difficult passages with apparent pleasure and ease, but also sustaining the controlled passion that characterizes the entire piece.

Kang’s performance was a hard act for Kim to follow. Rather than trying to one up her, he wisely took his showpiece on its own terms. Kreisler’s Liebesleid and Caprice viennois has episodic extreme challenges (Kreisler himself was one of the greatest violin virtuosos of all time), but fundamentally is a Viennese pastry designed to please the palate of the listener. Kim easily ate and digested the pastry, dusting himself off with a pizzicato ending to a decadent series of passages sadistically designed to test any violinist’s endurance and technique.

This delightful and energetic musical evening concluded with Sarasate’s Navarra for Two Violins and Piano, another challenging work that Kim and Kang pulled off with panache. The All Music Guide graphically depicts the ending of the score as follows: “The two violins take swirling, intertwining lines in the increasingly finger-twisting material that follows, then ascend well beyond the top of the staff for something resembling a Spanish minuet. . .before returning to a repeat of the main. . .section. The final page is a whirl of pizzicato notes and high-lying bowed pyrotechnics.” For Kim and Kang, it was all in a day’s work.