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.
