Music@Menlo delights with winter series

It was a typical Menlo type of program: esteemed masterpieces placing their renowned composers in interesting juxtaposition. Here the two composers were Johannes Brahms and Antonín Dvorák, contemporaries and friends in the 19th-century Austrian Empire. The program was designed to show both their similarities and their differences in character. The performers, also typically for Menlo, were mostly younger players, all of whom have been heard at Menlo before.

Music for four hands at one piano was popular in the home music-making environment of this pre-recording era. Both Brahms and Dvorák made their reputations with sets of folk dances for this medium. Wu Han and the young pianist Michael Brown played a selection of these. Their Brahms “Hungarian Dances” were suave and Viennese, swaying with abrupt changes in tempo and character. Their Dvorák “Slavonic Dances,” for which they exchanged places at the keyboard, were blunter and heavier, with a thundering quality not often heard in the more familiar orchestral versions.

The two larger-scale works on the program were designed to show the differences in the two composers’ temper and personality. Though Brahms could be warm and generous (as, for instance, in fostering the younger Dvorák’s career), he was notoriously reclusive and grumpy. He was also highly conscious of treading his career path in the shadow of the even grumpier Ludwig van Beethoven.

Brahms’ Piano Trio No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 101, is unlike much of his later music in not being somber and reflective. It’s a bold and declarative work in the spirit of Beethoven, given a darkly impassioned performance by Brown with violinist Paul Huang and cellist Dmitri Atapine. Even the more lyric and subdued middle movements came out vehemently.

Huang and Atapine joined Wu Han in Dvorák’s Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81. This is a different kind of work, as Dvorák was a different kind of man. One of the most emotionally well-adjusted of all great composers, happy in his marriage and his personal life, he wrote a placid and cheerful piano quintet. The challenge in performing this work is to keep it from becoming dull. In this concert, it was splendidly charming and tuneful all the way through, with the starring parts being played by the conspicuous and impassioned solos by the two players new to this piece, first violinist Chad Hoopes and violist Matthew Lipman. Dvorák was a violist himself and ensured that his own instrument got a leading role.

Menlo’s next event will be a benefit concert and reception on March 17 in one of the smaller halls at Menlo School in Atherton. The program will feature Bartók’s hair-raising Third String Quartet, a piano trio by Haydn, a violin and piano piece by Ravel, and Dohnányi’s delightfully Brahmsian Piano Quintet No. 1. Menlo’s other co-director, cellist David Finckel, will be among the performers.

At this event, the theme and program will be announced for this year’s summer Music@Menlo festival, which will run for the three weeks from July 13 to Aug. 4.