Let’s be grateful for those mid-century Russian composers who made so much emotional music and survived so much political oppression. Fortunately, the music endured and Stalin is gone: “Who thinks about him anymore?” pianist Wu Han said, warming up the sold-out Chamber Music Northwest audience on a cold Feb. 6 night at Portland’s The Old Church. 

Wu Han, looking bohemian and free-spirited in a flowing green and yellow outfit, bright red 4-inch heels peeking out from under her dress, is half of the stupendous and celebrated duo of David Finckel and Wu Han, 20-year artistic directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the world’s largest and most prestigious chamber music presenters. The two musicians are many other things, including prolific performers, teachers and innovators in the chamber music landscape. They played for two hours minus intermission, adding as an encore Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude 23. No. 10” to finish off their spectacular “Russian Revelry” concert. The excessive adjectives are simply irrepressible. 

This night it was the expressive Wu Han who took the lead in introducing the music of Nikolai Myaskovsky (only three people in the audience raised their hands to say they knew his music), Sergei Prokofiev, and of course, Sergei Rachmaninoff, whose Cello Sonata in G Minor, Op. 19 was saved for last.

The Rachmaninoff sonata for which the audience was waiting – and which was composed in 1901, the same year as his much loved Piano Concerto No. 2– was “the heart of the night,” Wu Han said. The extremely emotional third movement, six minutes of the 26-minute piece, steals hearts, including Wu Han’s, whose facial expressions were as dramatic and absorbing as her piano-playing.

The piece was written in 1901 after Rachmaninoff was coming out of a four-year depression. His first symphony had been a flop, though he had won, at 19 years old, the Great Gold Medal from the Moscow Conservatory of Music for his opera Aleko, and his massive hands made his phenomenal piano-playing that much effortless. After the disastrous symphony performance, further ruined by damning reviews (a drunk conductor was partially responsible), he dove deep into melancholy and was eventually helped by a hypnotist. The sonata’s fourth movement, the 11-minute “Allegro mosso,” is hypnotic, “then crazy,” as Wu Han said. The entire piece proved this duo’s musicianship and rise to magician status. Rachmaninoff set them up to claim that status by making the piano and cello equal partners rather than the pianist taking a back seat and accompanying.

While Wu Han pushed on the foot pedal of her iPad, Finckel turned the scores’ pages with his bow. Sometimes he didn’t look at the music. So much is baked in. The duo can pretty much play the entire chamber music repertoire for cello and piano – not that these two modest teachers let us know that. 

The evening’s preceding pieces included Prokofiev’s Cello Sonata in C Major, Op. 119. Written in 1949, four years before his death (his funeral fell on the same day as Stalin’s and was snuffed out by the Stalin proceedings), the sonata showed his whimsey and melodic leanings (don’t forget his Peter and the Wolf and Romeo and Juliet ballet, both blockbusters). In the 20-minute sonata, plenty of back and forth between the cello and piano occurred, a bit like a call-and-response. But we were all waiting for Rachmaninoff.

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To jump backward to the program’s beginning, Myaskovsky’s Cello Sonata No. 2 in A Minor, Op. 81 opened the concert. The now unfamiliar composer was a biggie in the mid-1930s in Russia; in a survey he ranked up with Stravinsky, Strauss, Sibelius and Rachmaninoff in popularity. The composer was influential in Russia, but not in the United States. His three-movement sonata traveled through a melancholic first-movement to a lullaby to “crazy Russian stuff,” in the final “allegro con spirito,” as Wu Han said.

Cellist Finckel, once part of the now defunct Emerson Quartet, and Wu Han, are married and for 22 years have run the Music@Menlo institute, which helped to generate chamber music groups all over the world. 

Gloria Chien, the co-artistic director of CMNW with her husband Soovin Kim, said the Music@Menlo institute “changed her life and gave her a voice in chamber music.” She wouldn’t be here in Portland running CMNW without Finckel and Wu Han, whom she calls “two of the most influential people in my life. … I found my identity in music at the institute,” when she first attended in 2006. “I was like a kid in a candy shop,” she said, with chamber music speaking to her and luring her talents. She stayed on, coached musicians, learned arts management and eventually ran its Chamber Music Institute. One thing led to another.

Now she is here, hiring her mentors to play.

Ever restrained and graceful, Finckel kissed Wu Han’s hand at the end of the concert. She seemed pleased and so was the audience.