Diaz, Sanders Join in a Satisfying Program

The cellist sat on a folding metal chair, a throw-pillow on the seat. Shaded floor lamps lit the music. Embers crackled in the fireplace nearby. The audience gathered a couple of feet away in front and behind, in the living and dining rooms. The rain poured outside.

It was another concert in the Da Camera Society’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites series, this one in Pasadena’s Villa Monticello Medici, an Italian Renaissance-inspired home built in 1928 by architect Paul R. Williams. Sunday afternoon, it lent the perfect setting, cozy and close, to the music at hand, performed by cellist Andres Diaz and pianist Samuel Sanders.

For a short while, you were in the trenches with two top-notch musicians. You felt the physicality of their efforts.

The performances were eventful. Diaz, winner of the 1986 Naumberg International Cello Competition, and Sanders, accompanist of Itzhak Perlman, have forged a fully collaborative team, a fact underlined by the spotlight-sharing sonatas on the program.

In Beethoven’s Opus 102, No. 2, they captured the mysterious intertwinings and drive with subtle shadings, temporal flexibility and hard-hitting intensity. If the thorny fugato sounded ragged at times, it emerged on the whole suitably rugged and implacable.

The 1948 Poulenc Sonata had the duo trading phrases like a couple of songbirds. Diaz pointedly popped short notes, and threaded long lines in a probing fashion, discovering their nooks and crannies on the way to the heights. Sanders, performing on Rudolf Serkin’s old piano, seemed to have all the color and touch he required at his disposal. Their playing in two Tchaikovsky pieces--”Romanse” and “Sentimental”--avoided generalized schmaltz in favor of substantive nuance, nicely calibrated to the confined space.