The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center brought a program devoted to combinations of wind instruments to the Barns at Wolf Trap Sunday afternoon. The presenter announced this summer that this will be its last season under Wu Han as artistic director. Wolf Trap credits her with significantly increasing attendance for chamber music concerts at the Barns, not least because of these performances by CMS of Lincoln Center.

This program followed a familiar formula: a major, rarely performed work, Poulenc’s Sextet for winds and piano, introduced by other little-known pieces for combinations of the same instruments. Horn player Radek Baborák and pianist Anne-Marie McDermott gave an elegiac rendition of Reinhold Glière’s Four Pieces for Horn and Piano. Extracted from another collection of chamber music for unusual pairings, the first two pieces in the set were composed for clarinet and piano.

Both players made the most of the late romantic idiom of these four mostly reflective works, from 1908. Baborák, in careful control of his instrument, matched the pianist’s surging interpretation without overwhelming the balance. His tone otherwise was for the most part consummately refined, as in the little horn cadenza before the return of the main theme in “Valse triste.”

Clarinetist David Shifrin and bassoonist Marc Goldberg mastered the eccentric Sonata for Clarinet and Bassoon, composed in 1922 by Francis Poulenc in three compact movements. The rhythmically active first movement abounded in burlesque antics, shared with equal enthusiasm between the two musicians. Goldberg moved as eloquently as possible in the slow movement’s accompanying figures, featuring wide leaps that sounded almost like yodeling. Both players sounded comfortable across the broad ranges demanded by the third movement as well.

The revelation of the evening came in Bohuslav Martinů’s Sonata for Flute and Piano, composed in 1945 while the Czech composer was staying in Cape Cod. At the keyboard, McDermott elegantly shaped the long introduction and later piano interlude of the first movement. Adam Walker, former principal flutist of the London Symphony Orchestra, responded with extraordinary virtuosity and musicality, especially in the rapid interplay between himself and McDermott at the piece’s climactic moments.

In the slow movement, Walker’s tone proved supple and velvety, effortlessly connected among the registers, with an especially beautiful, silvery low range. The third movement, which Martinů claimed to be inspired by the distinctive call of a whippoorwill he had nursed back to health, featured more superlative technical expertise from both flutist and pianist, even at a rapid tempo.

Given Wolf Trap’s post-intermission Q&A with the artists, a slight truncation of the typical CMS program could be a good idea. The obvious candidate in this concert was Beethoven’s Duo No. 3 for Clarinet and Bassoon, a very early work that sounds like cut-rate Mozart. Shifrin and Goldberg played it well, especially the flurry of 32nd notes in the final variation of the middle movement, but it seemed unneeded in addition to the Poulenc piece for the same instrumentation.

Oboist James Austin Smith finally got his turn in Carl Reinecke’s Trio for Oboe, Horn, and Piano, published in 1887. The German composer is perhaps better known as the conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, for reasons this piece made clear. Smith and Baborák made the most of their engaging themes in the first and third movements, with some light-hearted back and forth in the Scherzo and Finale, but the work is a curiosity at best.

Finally all six musicians convened for the main event, Poulenc’s Sextet for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, and Piano. Composed in the 1930s and revised in 1939, this offbeat piece exults in allusion to popular idioms, from circus music to jazz, swirling around Paris in that decade. Rarely will one hear a performance this evenly balanced, both in terms of the equal virtuosity of the six musicians and their collegial deference to one another.

After a lively, even zany opening to the first movement, Goldberg’s bassoon cadenza brought a breath of calm into the music, for a more serene middle section with exotic touches of flutter-tongued flute. The second movement (“Divertissment”) alternated between evocations of Mozart, the theme recalling Piano Sonata No. 16, and a slow, lush French song one might hear in a smoke-filled cabaret. Vertiginous speed marked the Finale, a galop à la Offenbach par excellence, rounding out an exhilarating concert.

Countertenor John Holiday and pianist Jeanne-Minette Cilliers perform songs by Price, Bonds, Gershwin, and others 3 p.m. January 19. wolftrap.org

 

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