Displaced by renovations from its home stage, the Concord Chamber Music Society found a friendly roof down the road in the Lexington Masonic Museum and Library for its second event of the season. The Sunday matinee concert journeyed from Ravel to striking examples of 21^st-century Romanticism. BSO colleagues violinist Lucia Lin and cellist Christine Lee and CCMS friends Kim Kashkashian and Marc-André Hamelin joined violinist-Artistic Director Wendy Putnam, the Society’s Artistic Director, in the all-star cast.

Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello had come to life in the early 1920s, ostensibly as a part of a larger Le Tombeau de Debussy project. Debussy’s death in the fall of 1918 had been felt as a huge loss by many, including, memorably, Hindemith who had wept in his trench on the German side, having heard the news across the front line. Whatever the complicated reasons, this particular tribute by a fellow Frenchman had managed to hide the grief extremely well.

Lucia Lin and Christine Lee delivered the opening of this duo, not to say duel, with appropriate dryness and precision worthy of épées. But as Ravel’s effort to find expressiveness by building up from the basics gained power, so did the voices of the two instruments. By the end of the first movement they found harmonious agreement. But the starting pizzicatos of Tres Vif scherzo resumed the duel, as if with slashing broad swords. The soulful figures of the Lent movement brought no peace either: the instruments ceased jagged attacks on each other, but instead competed by crowding out each other from the same register. Unfussy and determined phrasing in the finale brought back the original poking between protagonists; here it sounded with full intensity of playground taunts. The instruments vociferously fought for survival or at least for a right to express emotions in the cynical post-war Europe. The spirit of Ravel’s farewell to his great precursor — more like time-to-turn-the-page than rest in peace — came across with unabashed eloquence.

Having thus landed in the world of the 20^th -century social Darwinism, we were ready for a change of pace, and that arrived with Yehudi Wyner’s Concordance, one of the fruits of ongoing productive collaboration between the composer and the Society, this one stemming from 2013. Kim Kashkashian and Marc-Andre Hamelin joined Wendy Putnam and Christine Lee for this piano quartet.

When you hear that the title of the piece is a pun that evokes a dance in Concord, don’t fall for it. (Maybe you have to be in the Society’s home quarters on Main St. to catch the connection). At the same time, one of the alternate definitions of the title made perfect sense to me: the rhetoric of the quartet evoking an index to a holy text, with a bias towards its cosmogonic sections. Concordance began with a juxtaposition of the three thunderous piano notes and a rather Zen response from the ensemble. The same sequence repeated several times, with the initial prophetic scream across the octaves growing milder, and the calming textures of the response getting more agitated. At first the violin, and then the cello would take turns attracting attention to their heart-felt lines, but over them ruled an overall sense of archaic balance of forces of nature, all voices smoothly blended in magical unity of strings’ tones. To be sure, some strong characters in this drama added additional bursts of urgency, voiced by the piano, then again by the cello, but they all subsided as the primordial calm returned, all perturberances forgotten. The arch of the narrative closed to spellbinding effect.

Marc-Andre Hamelin’s Piano Quintet, in its home turf premiere, brought a complete change of scene from the first half. The composer — or to use his self effacing designation, pianist-who-composes — had been working on parts of it for a number of years, but the whole saw the light of stage only in 2022 in La Jolla.

Like probably most of our readers, I have had many chances over the years to hear Hamelin’s compositions, first experience dating back a good 30 years. Still nothing had prepared me for the wave of joy rising up from the first shimmerings of the piano and the long Bohemian tunes in the strings, as the Moto Perpetuo first movement got under way. I must have subconsciously desired that Dvořák could have written another piano quintet, and there it was, that second coming, or maybe his second American sojourn.

And what an eventful journey, too. The Passacaglia second movement, that started in a respectable East Coast vein, developed some jazzy elements, and soon its jagged movements resembled a New Orleans funeral procession.

From then on, I could not shake off the sense of westward travel. The Intermezzo emerged from tiniest sounds as if flowers in the desert, which blossomed into a delightful Mendelssohnian scherzo, delicately cultivated by the strings.

In the Rondo finale, the jazzy character grew more assured, and the abundance of musical ideas and rapidly shifting moods could only mean one thing: We had arrived at the ultimate destination for any creative spirit — Hollywood. The piano spent a few moments in a wistful solo reflection on how far we had gotten and what a rewarding journey it had been. But no time for that. There followed a frantic coda reminding that life of a Bohemian, who had made it in show business, would both exhaust and excite. For the listener however, no downsides, just pure excitement and a cure for many kinds of depression. Given the circumstances, I wonder if this quintet qualifies for an FDA Emergency Approval.

Victor Khatutsky has written for the Intelligencer since 2014. He also interests himself in genomics and the poetry of Boris Pasternak.