Dolce Suono at Laurel Hill

For its "Concerts by Candlelight" appearance at Laurel Hill Mansion in Fairmount Park, the Dolce Suono Trio presented four sonatas in which the flute played the starring role and the harpsichord and cello provided the accompaniment. All four pieces invited you to concentrate on the flute, an invitation that's especially hard to resist when a flutist of Mimi Stillman's caliber produces a performance marked by sharp enunciation and clear phrasing.

But the four sonatas all offered extra rewards to listeners who broadened their view and focused on all three instruments. This wider view produces a particularly striking effect when you listen to a Bach piece like the sonata that opened the program.

Some writers contend that Bach's contrapuntal complexities are mere intellectual exercises. I hear them as outbursts of creative exuberance that heighten effects like the gaiety of Bach's fast movements.

Last-minute substitute

The concert was a good example of the depth of Philadelphia's musical resources. Dolce Suono's regular cellist is the Philadelphia Orchestra's young assistant principal cellist, Yumi Kendall. Since she was temporarily unavailable, Mimi Stillman called on Priscilla Lee, whose bio includes an Avery Fisher Career Grant, summers at the Marlboro Festival, international appearances with an ensemble called the Trio Cavatina, and other tokens of a budding career as a globetrotting chamber musician.

Lee and Stillman had to exchange a few extra glances to maintain coordination, but that was the only indication that Lee isn't a regular member of this threesome.

Pianist at the harpsichord

The pianist Charles Abramovic presented an example of another kind of depth. As an accompanist, soloist and chamber musician, Abramovic is a pillar of Philadelphia's music scene. Somehow, in the midst of all that other activity, he's mastered the 18th-Century art of working with a score that presents the harpsichordist with a series of chord symbols and assumes he'll improvise an accompaniment.

This was the standard practice during the Baroque period. Harpsichordists who work with period instrument groups usually learn how to do it.

But a pianist who plays the harpsichord only now and then can also work with a modern score in which an editor has created a complete harpsichord part from the skimpy Baroque markings. The fact that Abramovic does it the old-fashioned way spiced the evening with a dash of spontaneity. It also tells us something about the attitude he brings to the keyboard.

Switching to the piccolo

The program presented flute sonatas by three giants of the High Baroque— Bach, Handel and Vivaldi— and ended with a sonata from the early Classical period by Bach's son, Carl Philip Emanuel. The three Baroque composers all worked with the same musical style, but the Dolce Suono players brought out their personal differences. Bach, as you'd expect, created the most complex tapestries. Handel and Vivaldi produced slow movements that sounded more sensual and languid.

For Vivaldi's G minor sonata, Stillman switched to the piccolo— a reasonable transfer, since many of Vivaldi's flute works were written with the ultra-high sopranino recorder in mind. Several years ago, Stillman mesmerized Karl Middleman's Classical Symphony audience when she played a Vivaldi piccolo concerto. Any concertgoer who remembers that performance would have loved this one.

Authentic setting (almost)

Four days before they presented this concert, the Dolce Suono Trio visited Princeton with a program devoted to American composers like Gershwin and Ned Rorem. They dipped into the 18th Century partly because Laurel Hill is an authentic 18th-Century mansion, carefully preserved by Women for Greater Philadelphia.

Granted, you can't create a totally authentic Baroque atmosphere when you present a concert supported by ticket buyers. In the 18th Century we wouldn't have been packed shoulder to shoulder into the maximum number of folding chairs the fire regulations let you cram into a small living room. Instead, half a dozen members of the more affluent classes would have lounged on chairs and sofas.

But that slight reduction in comfort matters less than a setting that puts everyone in the audience within a few steps of three first-class musicians playing some of the most enjoyable music ever written.