It’s always a treat to see a musical celebrity perform in Kansas City, but when the program features three luminaries, you sit up and take notice. That was the case at the Folly Theater in Kansas City on Thursday night as the Harriman-Jewell Series presented a stellar evening of chamber music with three musical titans: violinist Joshua Bell, cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Evgeny Kissin.
As Artistic Director Clark Morris explained from stage, the program would only receive American performances at the Folly Theater and in New York City’s Carnegie Hall.
Each of the artists has a long and distinguished career. Bell is one of the premier American violinists, performing with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the age of 14 and producing his first recording at 18. He currently serves as Musical Director for the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and has held the post since 2011. British cellist Isserlis enjoys a busy schedule playing with many of the world’s leading orchestras and first captured international acclaim with his premiere of John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil in 1988. Russian pianist Kissin garnered the attention of the musical world from his early teenage years with several recordings and international tours. Like Bell and Isserlis, he regularly performs with major orchestras around the world.
The evening opened with a rarely performed work, Solomon Rosowsky’s Fantastic Dance on Hebrew Themes for Piano Trio, Op. 6. Published in 1914, it embraces a folk tune collected by the ethnomusicologist Susman Kisselgoff in Lubavitch, a small town in western Russia that was an important seat of Jewish culture and heritage.
The composition is a lovely and moving piece, a vibrant Jewish dance that was played with beauty and emotion by the trio. It opened with resonant piano chords followed by richly ornamented solo cello and violin melodies played with extraordinarily rich tone. While the work began slowly, the ending featured highly virtuosic passages played with flair by the trio.
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 67 concluded the first half of the program. The work was completed in 1944 and dedicated to the composer’s friend and colleague Ivan Sollertinsky, who died at the age of 41. The composition opened in surprising fashion, with very high cello harmonics and the violin and piano playing in a very low register. The languorous opening indeed seemed to represent anguish. The remainder of the movement portrayed a variety of effective tonal colors: bouncing the bow off the strings, pizzicato (plucked) strings and percussive piano chords.
The second movement featured a fast and furious folklike melody that rotated from player to player. When Kissin had the melody, Bell and Isserlis expertly delivered offbeat pizzicato accents. The emotional third movement began with slow and resonant piano chords poignantly played by Kissin. The rich and evocative playing by Bell and Isserlis was achingly beautiful. The finale was like a folk tune, rousing and dancelike. The rollicking nature of the tune near the end of the movement was interrupted by the slow and emotionally charged piano chords heard earlier in the opening of the third movement.
The second half of the program featured full-blooded romantic fervor in a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 50. Like Shostakovich’s work, it was in part inspired by the death of a friend and colleague—in this case Nikolai Rubinstein, a teacher, pianist and conductor who also died young at the age of 45. While the piece contains only two movements, they are long and the performance lasted about forty minutes.
The opening movement is entitled “Pezzo elegiaco” (“Elegiac piece”), and the mournful tone was heard immediately in the rich opening theme for cello and violin, accompanied beautifully by Kissin. What struck me from the outset is that the sense of ensemble was so intimate and profound that it is hard to believe these marvelous instrumentalists don’t perform regularly as a full-time trio. Their passion was most evident in this work, with Bell’s burnished tone, Isserlis’ emotional response to the music and Kissin’s robust romanticism. Especially at the end of the movement, the trio stretched tempos to heighten the expressive nature of the music.
The concluding movement presented a massive set of variations on a theme that featured an impressive intersection of technique and raw emotion. The music kept shifting its character and incorporated a waltz-like dance (and Tchaikovsky the ballet composer knows how to write a dance tune!) and fugue. Near the end of the work the trio displayed a wild intense ride of furiously fast music before the slow ending that recalled themes from the opening elegy.
What a night it was at the Folly Theater—a performance to long remember! After a rousing audience ovation, the trio played an encore–the slow central movement from Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 49. The performance featured rhapsodic lyricism and a beautiful singing tone by all performers.
While this concert concluded the 2025-26 Harriman-Jewell Series, you can explore offerings for the 62nd season (2026-27) at www.hjseries.org.
This concert was reviewed on Thursday, May 28, 2026.
