Charmed evening of Brahms synergy

Chamber-music audiences live for that moment when a great work and its interpreters get together, and everything just clicks. When that happens, you want the performance to never end.

That was the case Wednesday evening in another sold-out concert of the Seattle Chamber Music Society's Summer Festival at Lakeside School, when five musicians took the stage for a memorable performance of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet. Rich in melody, deeply romantic with a tinge of melancholy, this work for clarinet and four strings is one of the chamber repertoire's great masterpieces — and like most masterpieces, it's not an easy work to pull off.

Seldom do you hear a performance in which all five players are so attuned to each other, so lovingly respectful of the score and so convinced that playing all the notes perfectly is just a point of departure for interpretation. Each of the players — clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein, violinists Stefan Jackiw and Aloysia Friedmann, violist Richard O'Neill, cellist Robert deMaine — commands a beautiful sound, and each produced that sound in near-ideal balance with the rest of the ensemble. Every phrase dovetailed seamlessly into the next.

Fiterstein's velvety, pliant clarinet sound entered as soft as a sigh in the opening Allegro; in the end of the Adagio movement, the tone disappeared like an exhaled breath. When you know you're going to be trading phrases with a first violinist like Jackiw, you take good care to make them beautiful. (And matching Jackiw for pure beauty of sound is no easy feat, either.)

When a performance like that ends, you feel you have been given a benediction.

The rest of the concert had its charms: a lively account of Mozart's C Major Sonata for duo pianists (Jeremy Denk and Adam Neiman), and an uneven but feisty reading of the Kodaly Duo for Violin and Cello (Daniela Shtereva and Amit Peled). In this program, however, the best was clearly saved for last.

Melinda Bargreen: mbargreen@seattletimes.com