Written by Greg Stepanich | 17 July 2010

The 10^th string quartet of Beethoven, depending on which scholarly camp you favor, is either a genial mid-career throwback to the peak of the Haydn classical style or the earliest example of the innovatory, astonishing manner of the late-period quartets.

Either way, it’s a remarkable piece of music from a remarkable year (1809), and it was the high point Friday night of the second series of concerts in the current Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival.

Known familiarly by its Harp sobriquet, the quartet (in E-flat, Op. 74), is a brilliantly structured piece that in its outer movements employs a free-fantasy approach that emphasizes drama and sonic effect, and in its inner movements trades a placid slow movement for a searing exercise in sustained, intense emotion, and swaps a minuet for a ferocious minor-major stomp-and-fugue that echoes the Fifth Symphony and presages the Ninth.

And it was well-served by its four players: Violinists Mei-Mei Luo and Dina Kostic, violist Rene Reder, and cellist Susan Bergeron. Throughout the work the four women played with deep commitment and engagement, and displayed fine technique and musicianship. Standout moments came with Bergeron’s first volley in the battle of the third-movement fugue, which she played with great speed while giving each note its full value, and with the second movement as a whole, which had an unbroken dramatic line that lost none of its focus even during the break in the middle.

The final theme and variations was somewhat shakier, with an underplayed viola variation and some initial fuzziness about each section before recovering in the two-against-three passage toward the end. The opening movement, too, had some moments of not-quite-togetherness, but the game changed for this foursome in the final moments of the opening, as Luo began her diminished-chord fiddling and the rest of the quartet sang out the central motifs with warmth and beauty. That’s where this performance jelled, and I think by Monday evening, with two more concerts under their belt, these musicians will be able to give this great work an exceptional reading.

The Beethoven was easily the best music on the program at Palm Beach Atlantic’s Persson Hall, which opened with another string quartet, the Oración del Torero, Op. 34, of Joaquín Turina. This is probably Turina’s best-known piece, and the string players – Kostic, Rebecca Didderich, Reder and cellist Christopher Glansdorp – performed it with panache and high style. Intonation, however, was problematic, with most of the unison octave passages not in tune, and that makes a difference in a piece as transparent, aromatic, and melody-oriented as this one. Glansdorp played beautifully, even when just buttressing the music with fat pizzicati, and the four musicians handled the whispered, atmospheric ending very nicely.

The Turina was followed by the sextet for piano and wind quintet of Francis Poulenc, one of the high points of French 20^th-century chamber music writing. Pianist Lisa Leonard was joined by flutist Karen Dixon, oboist Sherie Aguirre, clarinetist Michael Forte, hornist Ellen Tomasiewicz and bassoonist Michael Ellert for this piece, which the festival is revisiting after scheduling it some 16 years ago.

This is a piece for expert players, and the six musicians had no real difficulty playing in good French style or understanding Poulenc’s kitschy aesthetic, nor were the technical challenges beyond their reach. Tomasiewicz missed a couple notes here and there, but this is a murderous horn part, and what sticks in the memory more is her fine playing of the soaring high passages, especially in the finale.

But overall, this was a much too aggressive performance, as if the volume had been cranked up to 11 and left there. There was a powerful crispness to the music, particularly on Leonard’s part, who played with great strength and clarity, but what was missing was a sense of proportion and variety. Poulenc is a composer of many shifting moods, and it would have been better had the impressive bignesses of each movement also offered real contrast, not only in the presentation of the different themes, but in basic dynamics, which would have helped the music regain its subtlety.

The other work on the program was a contemporary piece, the Arioso for trumpet and wind quintet of Jerzy Sapieyevski, a Polish-born American composer who has taught at American University for years, and who wrote the work in 1986 at the request of the International Trumpet Guild. Trumpeter Marc Reese, whose standup-comedian style pre-performance remarks were quite funny, was the soloist.

This is a generally miserable piece of music, I’m sorry to say, at the level for the most part of a bad movie score. The piece dates from a period of classical composition when composers were beginning to feel unafraid to write tunes again, and Sapieyevski has a good feel for a catchy melody. But these pop-flavored tunes are too obvious, and the composer compounds the sin by leaving the accompanying quintet playing cheesy block chord changes most of the time.

Reese plays quite well, and he tossed off the scale rocket at the end of the watery-disco main section with sparkle each time it occurred. But he really needs to have something much better to play, like the Saint-Saëns Septet he performed with the festival a few years back. That’s a piece worth reviving, and one hopes the festival musicians won’t be offering the Arioso the same courtesy in years to come.

The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival repeats this program at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre, Delray Beach, and at 8 p.m. Monday at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Tickets are $22. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org.

Written by Palm Beach ArtsPaper Staff | 16 July 2010

Art: Work in ceramics by a group of artists who all have connections to the University of Florida opens today at West Palm Beach’s Armory Art Center and runs through Aug. 28. The 13 artists, assembled under the rubric Motley Moxie, shared the same working environment or instructors at UF, but have widely varied approaches to clay. The artists, in alphabetical order, are Pavel Amromin, Renee Audette, Andrew Cho, Lynn Duryea, Magda Gluszek, Yumiko Goto, Holly Hanassian, Tammy Marinuzzi, Conner McKissack, Beau Raymond, Jeremy Randall, Shawn Rommevaux and Alyssa Welch.

The opening reception begins at 6 p.m. today and runs through 8 p.m. Admission is $5, or free for Armory members. The center gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays. Call 832-1776 for more information, or visit www.armoryart.org.

Film: Most special-effects action thrillers ask us to leave our brains at the door and be satisfied watching the computer-generated eye candy. Then there is Inception, the marvel of a thinking person’s puzzle movie that takes some work to keep up with, but pays off in very satisfying ways. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a master extractor, a guy adept at cracking into the dreams of others and stealing their ideas for profit. Now in his last job before he hopes to retire -- uh-oh -- he is asked to do the opposite, to burrow into a corporate executive’s mind and plant a destructive idea.

The film takes place inside dreams, with a dream’s lack of logic or gravity, and there are levels and layers to these dreams to keep moviegoers further off-balance. Inception is the brain child of director-writer Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight), who moves up even higher in the Hollywood pecking order. – H. Erstein

Theater: The big event this weekend, theatrically speaking, is the debut of Florida Stage’s new home, a drastically reconfigured Rinker Playhouse within West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center. The space has been turned into a thrust stage theater, by placing the action on the floor and surrounding it with seats on three sides. The company may have lost a little of the intimacy it had in Manalapan, but it gains in stage height and depth, which will pay dividends in scenic and lighting possibilities.

The inaugural production is Low Down Dirty Blues, Randal Myler and Dan Wheetman’s revue of the sassy, double entendre-laden blues songs rolled out in an after hours Chicago club. It premiered recently at Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Ill., where the local critics raved about the four-member cast. Florida Stage’s box office phone number remains the same, (561) 585-3433. – H. Erstein

Music: The Palm Beach Opera offers a preview Tuesday night of the coming season with an event at the Harriet Himmel Theater in CityPlace featuring soprano Wendy Jones, mezzo Irene Roberts and baritone Graham Fandrei. The singers, accompanied by pianist Bruce Stasyna, will perform selections from the four operas taking the stage for the 2010-11 season: Verdi’s Nabucco, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, Mozart’s Così fan Tutte, and Puccini’s Tosca. The concert is preceded by a mixer at City Cellar and followed by a $125-per-ticket dinner (reservations due today) with the artists at Pistache, the French brasserie on Clematis Street.

Jones was recently seen as a fine Lady Billows in the company’s workshop production of Britten’s Albert Herring, and Roberts, who sang Emilia in Verdi’s Otello and Mercédès in Bizet’s Carmen last season, won second prize in the recent Palm Beach Opera vocal competition with a performance of the aria Nobles seigneurs, salut! from Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. Both are former members of the Young Artists program, and Fandrei, a well-known South Florida baritone, will be singing in Florida Grand Opera’s upcoming production of Cyrano, a new opera (2007) by American composer David DiChiera. The concert, which is sponsored by Kretzer Piano’s Music of the Mind series, begins at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Harriet. Tickets are $10, and proceeds go to benefit the company’s education programs. For tickets or more information, call 833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org. – G. Stepanich

King Louis XIV had a lofty sense of style, and he drew some of the finest artists in France to his court during his reign, which at 72 years was the longest of all European kings and queens. Last night, Seraphic Fire’s summer concert series continued with the first night of The Court of the Sun King, an evening of music by two of the best-known composers of Louis’ time. Sopranos Kathryn Mueller (a fine soloist in a Bach cantata earlier this year) and Rebecca Durren are joined by Seraphic Fire founder Patrick Dupré Quigley at the keyboard for sacred music by François Couperin and Louis-Nicolas Clérambault. Featured are four motets by Clérambault for the king, the Virgin Mary, Christmas Day and Mardi Gras, and three surviving Leçons de Ténèbre of Couperin.

This is exquisite, absorbing music, and marks another notable concert in what has been an exceptional season and off-season of Baroque music. Tonight’s concert begins at 7:30 p.m. at First United Methodist Church in Coral Gables. Saturday, it can be heard at All Saints Episcopal in Fort Lauderdale beginning at 8 p.m., and at 4 p.m. Sunday the program is presented for the final time at Miami Beach Community Church. Tickets are $30; call 305-285-9060 or visit www.seraphicfire.org. – G. Stepanich

Written by John Thomason | 13 July 2010

Terribly Happy (Oscilloscope Laboratories)

Release date: July 13

Standard list price: $26.99

Following in the footsteps of Roger Vadim (…And God Created Woman), George Sluizier (The Vanishing) and Michael Haneke (Funny Games), Danish filmmaker Henrik Ruben Genz becomes the latest foreign-language director to remake his own movie in English with his latest picture, Terribly Happy. This itch to Hollywoodize previous successes is a curious tendency that is probably worth an essay in itself, invariably suggesting creative stagnation, acknowledgement of imperfection in the original work, the chance to pursue new ideas in an old context or some combination of these motivations. Suffice it to say that in the particular case of Terribly Happy – Denmark’s official entry in this year’s Academy Awards – a Hollywood riff on the story makes more sense than any of these others, because Terribly Happy is already rooted in traditions of iconic American cinema; it’s a film that’s foreign in language only.

Perhaps the most immediate genre identification is that of the classic American western, albeit a subversive one. The protagonist (and gradual antihero) of the film is Robert Hansen (Jakob Cedergren), the archetypal new marshal sent to clean up a corrupt rural town. He carries his own distressing emotional baggage – he was reassigned to the town after a violent domestic dispute – but compared to the area’s drunken, drug-addled, pockmarked denizens, Robert is a force of sanity and ostensible goodness, trying as he might to play things by the book. But he’s soon informed that the previous marshal, like many people in the town who didn’t play by its rules, “disappeared.”

The atmosphere of Terribly Happy is ominous, engrossing and sustained from the opening fade-in to the closing credit. The color-drained, barren tableaux of cows, mud and a forbidding bog provides a despairing context for the weird local color, including a shady doctor who shoots heroin (Lars Brygmann), a shopkeeper who locks children in storage compartments, and a little girl who pushes a stroller without a baby down desolate streets while her father (Kim Bodnia), the town’s intimidating kingpin, beats her mother (Lene Maria Christensen), the town’s closest approximation of a looker.

It’s through this prototype of the vulnerable, battered wife that Robert becomes entangled in his own sordid, bloody mess, calling to mind The Postman Always Rings Twice and the entire pulp-novel pantheon. Thus the film shifts from classic Western to classic noir faster than you can say “Anthony Mann,” while reinterpreting both Hollywood genres in a modern absurdist setting reminiscent of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet and, as many critics have already pointed out, the world of early Coen Brothers.

Like those directors’ best works, there’s an ironic smirk underneath the fatalistic terror of the practically predestined plot that many will find alienating. But I admire the film’s deliberate plunge into cult oddity, one that wears its cinematic references brazenly on its blood-stanched sleeve. Besides, beneath all the irony, there’s a bleakness no dark humorist could conceal. Robert becomes so hardened by his experience in the town – where it’s dump or be dumped in that hideous swamp – that the feeling you’re left with is fairly brutal and uncompromising, so much that no Hollywood ending could alleviate. Let’s hope Genz retains this atmosphere when he films his own Hollywood ending.

Everlasting Moments (Criterion)

Release date: June 29

SLP: $35.99

Shot appropriately in the faded sepia tones of turn-of-the-20^th-century photography, Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments is a handsome memory film about the real-life Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen), a housewife locked in a repressive marriage to a violent drunkard in pre-suffrage Sweden, who finds a liberating creative outlet in a Contessa box-camera. Everlasting Moments is a novelistic personal narrative, but it’s also a sweeping look at Sweden’s social and political history in the early 1900s, refracted through the lens of Larsson’s camera and her ever-expanding family (in a sobering reminder of those pre-birth-control times, we see a pregnant Larsson repeatedly jumping off her kitchen table in an attempt to abort her seventh child). It’s an emotionally rich movie composed of tight, classical portraiture and little visual miracles, whether it’s a butterfly’s light reflecting onto the hand of a shopkeeper or a moving iris shot of Larsson, the unheralded photographer becoming, for once, the camera’s subject. Criterion’s two-disc, director-approved set includes an hour-long documentary about Troell titled Jan Troell’s Magic Mirror, a documentary spotlighting photographers from the real Maria Larsson and a featurette on the making of Everlasting Moments.

Lost Keaton (Kino)

Release date: July 6

SLP: $25.99

Unlike Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton never turned his iconic silent-film star status into an equally sensational career in the talkies. But this collection of “lost” shorts (if they’re lost, how are we able to see them?) debunks the popular wisdom that his career in sound cinema was a complete bust, and it’s due vindication for an actor I’ve always preferred over his main period rival. There are 16 shorts total here, shot between 1934 and 1937 and mastered from the archival 35mm source materials. The two-reelers, which run from roughly 15 and 20 minutes each, find Keaton exploring his comic ingenuity on the baseball diamond, the opera, the chemistry lab and much more, and the DVD also includes a musical montage of Keaton’s pratfalls and stunts titled “Why They Call Him Buster.” It’s a real gem of a set, and it coincides with the July 6 two-disc reissue of Steamboat Bill, Jr. ($26.99), also from Kino.

Pretty Bird (Paramount)

Release date: June 29

SLP: $14.49

This poor little dramedy about three men who attempt to design and market a rocket belt debuted at Sundance at 2008 and never found a distributor. Looking at its belated DVD release, it’s easy to see why; though it has some memorable characters and an appealing cast, its story is programmatic, never aspiring to anything more than going through the motions. Billy Crudup plays Curtis Prentiss, a delusional huckster and empty suit whose latest get-rich-quick scheme involves the development of a rocket belt, or jet pack, which has beguiled rocket scientists for decades. He culls his wisdom from corny self-help platitudes and tired Dead Poet’s Society dialogue; his lack of business acumen and decidedly unhip cultural references make him a pretty funny character until you realize he’s just doing Michael Scott from The Office. Curtis recruits old friend and mattress salesman Kenny (David Hornsby) to be the money man on the venture, and he discovers out-of-work rocket scientist Rick Honeycutt (Paul Giamatti in one of his more odious roles) to do all the work for what turns out to be none of the credit. Cue the requisite internecine conflicts and spewn invectives that accompany any story of greed’s corrupting influence in the face of potential profit. Actor Paul Schneider, who also wrote the script, directs for the first time, and he brings an unobtrusive, workmanlike style to the material. But still: been there, done that.

Written by Hap Erstein | 12 July 2010

Tom Bloom does not give up on a play easily.

The New York actor-turned-director began helping to develop Bob Clyman’s Secret Order, a drama of ideas about a cure for cancer that runs into a buzzsaw of research politics, some 15 years ago. He not only directs the production that opened at the Caldwell Theatre this weekend, but when featured actor Gordon McConnell was hospitalized unexpectedly with symptoms of disorientation Saturday, Bloom subbed in the role by Sunday, script in hand.

“I started reading early drafts of it, and was involved with it all the way up to its aborted Broadway run,” Bloom said during rehearsals. The play, which has not had much luck, medically speaking, was on track to open on Broadway in 2005, until John Spencer (of TV’s The West Wing) succumbed to cancer, scuttling that commercial production.

Spencer was to have played Robert Brock, a formerly promising research scientist turned abrasive laboratory administrator, McConnell’s role at the Caldwell. When Brock reads a paper by naïve but talented young scientist William Shumway on a new approach to killing off cancer cells, he brings him to New York and lavishes attention and resources on him. But as Shumway’s lab results start going bad, he hides the data, putting the cure and his career in jeopardy.

“I’ve always been interested in science,” says Bloom of his attraction to the script. “Bob (Clyman) is a psychologist and he’s always written about things with a scientific connection. In Bob’s plays there is often a central character who is in a situation that spirals downward out of control. Not through a tragic flaw, unless you can consider innocence a flaw. In this play, his naïveté is what allows the younger character to go down the hole. When he wrote this one about cloudy ethics that get murkier, it just sort of took my interest.”

If science is not your thing, Bloom feels you can still enjoy Secret Order. “Yes, the science is important, but what we’re really watching is the relationship between a very naïve, almost literally fatherless, young scientist and this mentor who runs an enormously powerful organization. There’s a kind of father-son relationship that develops between them that gets threatened. So there’s a potential scientific loss as well as a personal loss.”

Coincidentally, Bloom and the Caldwell’s new artistic director, Clive Cholerton, worked together as actors 20 years ago at a summer theater in Monmouth, Maine. They had lost track of each other, but when Bloom heard of Cholerton’s new position, he sent him a copy of Secret Order and it quickly landed on the Caldwell’s summer schedule.

Bloom has seen other regional productions of the play and feels that some of them have erred by “going to the sentimental side.” Massachusetts’ Merrimack Repertory Theatre brought the play off-Broadway three years ago, but as Bloom puts it, “That production, for my money, was a little soft. It didn’t have the bite that the play can have. The young scientist should really find himself in a shark’s world.”

* * *

The unfortunate medical mishap of Gordon McConnell aside -- and let’s hope it is not any more serious than that, the problems with Secret Order are not with the Caldwell production. Yes, it felt under rehearsed by Friday’s opening performance, but that seems minor next to the overwritten and under-edited script. Instead of the much-massaged and tested 15-year-old script that it is, it comes off like an early draft, which often bogs down in the minutiae of scientific methodology.

There are plenty of ideas worth pondering here -- science versus commerce, personal interests versus community welfare, adhering to accepted work standards versus saving lives -- but they are introduced so inertly, buried in verbiage. There is a natural interest in these topics, but you are likely to have your patience tested over the course of the two-and-a-half-hours-plus running time of Secret Order.

The script centers on young William Shumway, played by Nick Duckart (The Whipping Man) initially as a Midwest bumpkin. His performance grows more subtle, as the character becomes more acclimated to the urban environment. If Shumway remains in over his head, Duckart never is. In the past year, he has done a handful of major roles at theaters throughout South Florida, an important addition to the area’s acting pool.

McConnell was having noticeable trouble with his lines at Friday night’s opening performance and some of that may have been due to his medical condition. Still, he is well cast as Robert Brock, projecting an impatient arrogance, bullying his way through all situations, with a gruff exterior that he gradually lets us see beneath.

Katie Cunningham and Howard Elfman fill out the company as Shumway’s eager student assistant/prospective love interest and as an aging scientist in Brock’s corral whose stock keeps falling as Shumway’s rises. Both characters are little more than dramatic contrivances, underlings who eventually get the upper hand a bit too predictably.

We need plays like Secret Order that tackle big themes and issues, but Clyman seems to have stuffed his script with too many ideas. Oddly, the Caldwell insists on labeling the play “a comedic thriller,” when it is neither comic nor thrilling.

SECRET ORDER, Caldwell Theatre Company, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, Aug. 2. Tickets: $38-$45. Call: (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432.

Written by Greg Stepanich | 10 July 2010

Pieces of music come and go, sometimes just once before disappearing, sometimes aired out only every once in a while like an unfashionable sweater found in the depths of Grandfather’s closet.

But many of these works are pieces of real merit, and it’s up to performing organizations to start turning old and new rarities into repertory. The musicians of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival began that process in earnest Friday night at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Hall with the first program of their current 19^th season of summer concerts.

Friday’s program (which repeats Sunday and Monday) was a challenging, demanding assemblage that included brand-new music and two older pieces that the group has recorded on its series of six discs for Boca Raton’s Klavier Records. What the audience heard was the formation of the festival’s own canon, its own discoveries, and if the wider musical world pays more attention to pieces such as the Suite for oboe, clarinet and viola of Randall Thompson, or the Nonet of Bohuslav Martinů, it will have this durable South Florida event to thank.

The same goes for Gee’s Bend Pieces, which had its world premiere in January at Lynn University during a weeklong new music happening featuring its composer, Kenneth Frazelle. It’s a trio for marimba, piano and trumpet, and pianist Lisa Leonard, who asked Frazelle to write the piece, helped make a strong case for it Friday night when she brought it back for this week of festival programs. Whereas the debut performance by a talented Lynn student ensemble had an almost raucous energy, this reading of the four-movement work had more shape, with Leonard, trumpeter Marc Reese and percussionist Michael Launius making the most of Frazelle’s prominent motifs and abundance of instrumental color.

This is a well-crafted, big-boned, forceful composition, strongly tonal and brashly harmonized, that is meant to evoke the celebrated African-American folk-quilting community of Gee’s Bend, Ala. Its two outer movements are powerfully rhythmic, particularly the finale (Dances), which goes through several different styles including a section that has the flavor of early jazz.

The second movement, Hymn Fade, makes a moving impression, as amid an almost constant blur of marimba tremolando chords a simple hymn tune in the piano makes its appearance, a melody that is then seconded by the trumpet. It is a lovely, ecstatic movement, and it serves as the emotional heart of this fine new piece of very American music. Aside from a minor flub in the first measures, Reese played with command and beauty, and Launius was excellence personified, building up huge heads of rolling-chord steam and dashing off the climbing scales of the fourth movement with admirable precision.

And Leonard remains one of the best pianists to be heard in this region, a player of consistently high quality whose musical intent can be understood immediately as she plays; she knows what message she wants to get across, and conveys it with absolute clarity.

Gee’s Bend Pieces followed the Thompson Suite, written in 1940 by the Harvard academic best-known for his Alleluia, a short choral work beloved by school and professional singing groups. The five-movement suite – played by oboist Sherie Aguirre, violist Rene Reder and clarinetist Michael Forte – is a little masterpiece of homespun Americana, cannily written for an unusual but pleasing combination of instruments whose mid-range warmth should recommend it to other writers. The most affecting of the movements here was the fourth, a Lento religioso that suggested in its minor-tonality modal way an ancient hymnody of severe devotion, the gorgeousness of its primary melody notwithstanding.

Aguirre played with a large, fat sound that lost none of its roundness even in the highest registers, for which Forte’s somewhat softer, breathier sound made a good match. Reder provided expert harmonic support for her two partners, and in the solo passages of the second movement, played with a grave kind of elegance that was most appealing.

The Thompson was one of two works on the program that the festival musicians have performed in past seasons and then recorded, the other being the Martinů Nonet, which is for string trio, wind quintet and bass. Written in 1959, this three-movement work is classic Martinů in its lightheartedness, quirky harmonies, and catchy rhythms, and like the Thompson deserves to be regularly programmed on chamber music concerts.

The nine musicians blended with skill; there was no sense here of mismatch, of too many winds to too few strings, or of two different sound qualities colliding. Rather, it had a rough-and-ready unity that served the music well. Hornist Ellen Tomasiewicz was particularly good, bringing an impressively big sonic presence to the first and second movements.

The concert opened with an early work of Schubert, the String Trio in B-flat, D. 581. Here, too, is a neglected but worthy work, in which the 20-year-old composer writes in the spirit of Haydn, but with a melodic distinction all his own. Violinist Mei-Mei Luo, violist Rebecca Didderich and cellist Christopher Glansdorp gave a fine account of it, collaborating well and effectively bringing out the work’s variety.

Luo’s intonation in the first movement was somewhat imprecise, especially because of the wry, accidental-heavy nature of the opening theme, which sneaks around the notes of the tonic scale and has to be right on the money in order to make musical sense. Things were much better in this regard in the charming second movement and the lyrical third; Didderich’s solo work in the minor-key section of the second and the trio of the third was excellent.

The second half began with Luo and cellist Susan Bergeron in Passacaglia, a theme-and-variations duet showpiece by Norwegian composer and conductor Johan Halvorsen (1864-1935), based on a passacaglia from a keyboard work by Handel. This is an exciting, sparkling piece that shows what a composer with imagination and resource can do with some very basic material.

Here again there were intonation problems at the beginning from Luo, but she recovered and was able to show off her considerable digital prowess in these variations, notably at one point where she played a high-floating variation entirely in harmonics. Bergeron was terrific throughout, rapidly scaling some broken diminished chords in one passage and yet able to make them speak as harmonies, and matching Luo run for run as they tossed off this light but entertaining morsel.

The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival repeats this program at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre, Delray Beach, and at 8 p.m. Monday at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Tickets are $22. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org.