Alex Tuchman and his team of top musicians performed three evenings of virtuoso music drawn from the piano repertory at an intimate concert last week.

Some of it was familiar to us; a lot was not. All of it was perfectly performed, leading us on voyages of discovery to new soundscapes, moods and associations conjured by well-known or unfamiliar composers.

A note about the team. Alex Tuchman, Eteri Anjaparidze, Inga Kashakashvili, Santiago Lomelin and guest cellist Kate Kayaian are all gifted master musicians who came over as modest, unassuming and thoroughly approachable people.

Lomelin set the scene with three preludes by George Gershwin, written in 1926. The word “prelude” is prophetic here because under his precise, dynamic treatment we got a preview of every one of Gershwin’s later works in miniature snatches of melody.

Kashakashvili followed with a series of subtle waltzes including George Oakley’s Night Waltz. This was an emotionally troubling, dark, bass piece with occasional glimpses of lyricism. Judging from her expressions and body language, Kashakashvili was emotionally invested in this complex music. It was an added bonus for us to know that the composer himself was in the audience.

A high point of the three concerts was Tuchman and Kayaian’s performance of Shostakovich’s 1934 Sonata for Cello and Piano. Written at a time of the emerging Soviet dictatorship, Shostakovich’s sonata runs a whole gamut of emotion – from jaunty insouciance and jolly folk dance through tragic loss, foreboding, terror and sheer abstract lyricism. This was a masterful performance of a work little known to us, but somehow, given recent history, intensely topical.

Four-handed piano works formed a major part of the performances. Schubert’s Eight Variations on a French Song performed by Kashakashvili and Lomelin was among our favourites. Kashakashvili conveyed within the song’s tight structure the sense of dreamy foreboding of John Keats’s poem, La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

In a way, the piece looks forward to the composer’s own Winter Journey song cycle. Samuel Barber’s six-movement Souvenirs, Ballet Suite performed by Anjaparidze and Tuchman was new to me but had some really interesting features. This was entitled a “memory” piece, so Barber used dance elements from the Victorian age as well as from his own.

The Waltz was vaguely satirical and self-parodying. The Schottische was like a music hall rag with added random rubato. Hesitation Tango was a languid, largo habanera, played with strategic hesitation, almost as if the composer was trying to piece the score back together from some half-remembered tune.

The third evening of the festival formed a musical tribute to Sergei Rachmaninoff, 150 years after his birth, commencing with Santiago Lomelin’s masterly interpretation of three preludes from Op 23 followed by Tuchman and Kashakashvili ‘s Etudes-Tableaux and ending with another major work, the Six Morceaux for four hands, written when the composer was just 21 years old.

Andjaparidze on the bass/tenor side of the keyboard alternated with Kashakashvili and Tuchman on the melody/treble side to play these richly harmonic and deeply emotive pieces. Two in particular stood out: No. 3, Russian Theme, a gradually building hymnlike archetypal Russian melody which was simultaneously tragic and yearning, and No. 5, Romance, which becomes what it describes as it subtly entwines the two players’ melodies, then equally subtly moves them apart.

We look forward to welcoming these wonderful musicians to Bermuda again.

The Bermuda Piano Festival was held in the Rick Faries Gallery of Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art on June 20, 22 and 24.