Charles Petzold

The Tuesday Matinee concerts at Merkin Hall are one of the several series of inexpensive chamber music concerts in the city. With a subscription to all eight concerts of the season, the individual ticket price comes out to $14.28. It’s a real bargain to see mostly youngish soloists and small ensembles

Tuesday Matinees returned after a 19-month absence today. Vaccination cards and photo IDs where checked on the sidewalk. Temperatures were checked inside. Masks were required for the duration of the recital.

Today’s concert featured Minsk-born violinist Daniel Kurganov with pianist Constantine Finehouse. The pair have recorded two CDs and plan for a third featuring all three violin sonatas of Brahms.

The recital began with Ernest Bloch’s marvelous 1923 work Baal Shem subtitled “Three Picture of Hasidic Life” and named after the 18th century founder of the Hasidic movement. It begins with a mournful confession, then an often exultant celebration of song, followed by a joyful rejoicing.

Kurganov and Finehouse followed that with Tchaikovsky’s trite Valse Sentimentale from his Op. 51 piano pieces adapted for violin and piano, and without waiting for audience reaction, followed with an early Rachmaninoff song “Sing not, my Beauty” also adapted for violin and piano.

The program included a New York premiere of “Aurora” for violin and piano by young (b. 1990) composer Stephanie Ann Boyd, who was in the audience. “Aurora” is a six-minute tribute to the American violinist of the early 20th century, Maud Powell, that achieved a real magical moment when rippling piano figures were accompanied with long violin melodies.

The first half of the program concluded with Ernest Chausson’s quasi-piano-concerto Poeme of 1896, heard here in the version for violin and piano. It begins with often achingly exquisite passages, eventually beomes triumphant, but then retreats into heartbreak.

It’s really unfair to include Brahms in any concert of chamber music because he makes all the other composers on the program seem second rate. Kurganov and Finehouse concluded the program with a spellbinding performance of Brahms Violin Sonata No. 3, both dramatic and sensitive.

They came back for an encore of Dvořák’s ever touching “Songs My Mother Taught Me.”