Natalie Zhu with Ricardo Morales

Here's one of the best consumer reports I can hand you: Attend any chamber program that includes piano work by Natalie Zhu.

That's not exactly a hot bit of inside dope. Natalie Zhu was an Astral Artist in the late '90s; she won an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2003; and she toured with Hillary Hahn for many years, playing in programs in which her piano and Hahn's violin usually interacted as equal partners.

Still, my recommendation deserves extra emphasis. Zhu has been making more local appearances lately. She made a big hit when she filled in at the last minute at an 1807 & Friends concert a couple of years ago, and she's added an annual guest slot with 1807 to her listings on the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society schedule. She's become a major addition to a roster of Philadelphia-based musicians that already included several impressive chamber pianists.

You expect the clarinet to sing; it's a melody instrument. But the Brahms sonata for clarinet and piano that opened the Chamber Music Society's January 10 program was a true duet, with a piano part that sounded just as lyrical, in Zhu's hands, as the clarinet line played by Philadelphia's leading local clarinet virtuoso, the Philadelphia Orchestra's principal clarinet, Ricardo Morales.

Verdi crowd-pleaser

The piece that opened the second half offered Morales and Zhu their best opportunity to demonstrate their emotional range and technical skill. Luigi Bassi's Concert Fantasia on themes from Rigoletto runs through all the moods of Verdi's opera, from dramatic big orchestra crashes by the piano to lyric arias for both instruments. It's clearly intended as a crowd-pleaser, and Philadelphia's most musically sophisticated crowd gave it the best hand of the evening.

And why not? It's a hugely entertaining piece as well as a workout for both musicians.

For the finale, Morales and Zhu joined forces with Morales's Philadelphia Orchestra colleague, cellist Efe Baltacigil, and turned to the weightier moods and complex conversational interactions of one of the last pieces Brahms added to the chamber repertoire: the Clarinet Trio in A Minor that he composed three years before his death.

Earlier, at the end of the second half, Zhu and Morales took on an equally demanding work that runs through a different set of moods and takes a different approach stylistically— the Saint-Saëns 1921 Sonata for Clarinet and Piano.

In Yannick's wake

I attended this concert the Monday after the Orchestra's new conductor-designate led four sold-out concerts. The Orchestra's music director is obviously a major figure in our cultural life. But concerts like this Chamber Music Society program are a healthy reminder that conductors accept the leadership of an orchestra partly because it can offer them a prime instrument (along with the usual financial inducements). Nobody ever made music with a stick, as Davis Jerome, the conductor of the late, fondly remembered Mozart Society orchestra, liked to say.

Conductors shape complicated structures. They provide the overall vision that transforms a potpourri of individual performances into a unified work of art. But they're only one component in a complex enterprise. Without musicians like Morales and Baltacigil, the best conductors on the globe would just be well-dressed exhibitionists frantically waving their arms.