Anchorage Daily News

We’ve heard some remarkable visiting cellists in Anchorage this season — remarkable as much for how their personalities meld with their talent and emerge in the music.

For Mark Kosower, on the other hand, the music’s personality is what stands out. He is, in all respects, a marvelous interpreter: accurate, alert, smoothly nuanced, capable of handling special effects with masterful precision.

Most important, however, his presentation of the score is translucent.

No showmanship for its own sake here. More than once during Friday night’s opening concert in the Winter Classics chamber music series I had the pleasant sensation that there was no human being making the magic happen, that the cello was somehow directly connected to the composer’s imagination.

Of course Kosower was the connection, but elegantly unobtrusive. And Friday night was more or less his show. Accompanied by pianist Jee-Won Oh, he performed the wildly technical Cello Sonata by Karen Khachaturian (nephew of better-known Aram Khachaturian), the more sensual, romantic one by Francis Poulenc and a lighthearted “Fantasy on ‘Figaro’ ” by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, plus a romantic encore, “Serenade” by David Popper — all with equal poise and effect.

Oh’s accompaniment was no less competent or sublime. But, with a few exceptions in the Khachaturian, the piano had limited opportunities to dominate.

She got her own turn in the spotlight Saturday night when she performed some of Rachmaninoff’s piano preludes. But from what I heard on Friday, it seemed safe to conclude that both Kosower and Oh are musical gold, standouts even among the highly qualified performers that series director Paul Rosenthal has dependably produced over the years.

Rosenthal joined his guests for the opening piece, Mozart’s Piano Trio in C, with a reading of the piece that was as smooth and beautiful as polished marble and made promises for the rest of the evening that were amply fulfilled.

Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.

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