CLASSICAL20.COM

The recital celebrated the release of Ms. Jansen’s latest CD, “Beau Soir,” a mostly French program (on Decca), and included a few of the pieces from the disc, as well as Franck’s A major Sonata, which is not on it. Ms. Jansen and Mr. Barnatan began with Ravel’s Sonata in G, a piece ideally suited to a Greenwich Village club, given its central “Blues” movement. They played it, with its bent pitches and fluid tempos, as if the blues were — at least for the moment — their musical mother tongue.

Elsewhere in the Ravel, Ms. Jansen’s centered tone and rich vibrato and Mr. Barnatan’s precise, crystalline sound yielded a refined intensity that put the “Blues” movement in its Parisian perspective. That quality also served Messiaen’s “Thème et Variations” particularly well.

Read the full review in The New York Times here.