It was method (or it was madness?) to repeat the major work on Sunday's chamber recital at Old First Church. Maybe both. Either way, I know my own mind was torn after hearing Darius Milhaud's Sonata for Oboe, Clarinet, Flute and Piano twice in one concert. This pungent — or was that plangent? — piece served as both a provocative premise and a surprising final twist.

As an opener, Milhaud's Sonata was a puzzling display of the collective talents of pianist Kristin Pankonin, flautist David Johnson, oboist Roger Wiesmeyer, and clarinetist Art Austin. In the context of an all-French recital, the sonata seemed surprisingly massive and hard-nosed. French composers have achieved unparalleled clarity, charm, and wit in other works for piano and winds. But here, the 26-year-old Milhaud seemed to swamp his thoughts with dissonance, opening with a delicacy that is quickly torn apart by a clash of keys, later erupting with blocks of wild sonorities that force the winds into potentially unflattering registers. It was both Faun and Firebird in one body.

When the Milhaud returned to conclude the concert, however, much had changed. The opening oboe melody that once falsely promised sweetness now seemed ineffably plaintive. The obvious homage to Debussy in the piano's motifs now resembled a breath of a simpler past extinguished in an eruption of tightly controlled chaos (the third movement, Importé). And the last movement, Douloureux, once merely dour, was now a dignified memorial.

I left the concert not sure if Milhaud's piece was Jekyll or Hyde. Which performance was right: the brilliantly calculated and deeply felt second? or the audacious and vulgar first? The split impressions could have been due to differences in playing, but I think instead the intervening works altered the mood.

Pankonin followed the opening Milhaud with judiciously conceived performances of three Debussy Preludes for Piano. Then, in Paul De Wailly's Aubade, Johnson, Wiesmeyer, and Austin played an imaginative romp of instrumental color that fleshed out Debussy's pianistic example. The aftertaste of Milhaud's brash youth had been washed away in prototypical Gallic refinement and flair.

Then the programming forced a reconsideration, starting with two sides of Francis Poulenc's personality. Before the break, Johnson and Pankonin played Poulenc's exquisite Sonata for Flute and Piano. Their performance hinged on small changes in dynamics and on Johnson's ability to coalesce his tone into a cool purity for the sweet middle Cantilena and then pour forth shimmering and effusive sounds for the lighthearted Presto giocoso.

That was Poulenc the gracious, serving quietly confidant discordance beside captivating melody. Then Wiesmeyer and Pankonin presented the Sonata for Oboe and Piano — Poulenc the doleful. In the last movement of this, his last piece, the composer shapes his tunefulness into a mournful stillness. The subtleties of Wiesmeyer's cantabile style and superb tone — projecting a glint of light in shadow — suited perfectly the elegiac conclusion.

Confirming the transformation of light to dark, Austin followed with the solo clarinet movement from Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. The virtuoso work is a meditation on the freedom of the birds during the composer's captivity in a Nazi concentration camp. Austin's clean-toned performance radiated Messiaen's optimism without stinting the tragedy.

The performers could not have set up the reprise of the Milhaud more effectively. The Sonata's toughness may be a search for freedom, just like Messiaen's piece. Perhaps an agonized Milhaud sought release as a young composer in 1918, trying to move on from a World War while writing in Madrid in the midst of a deadly influenza pandemic. If anyone was of two minds at Sunday's concert, it was probably Milhaud himself.

(Jeff Rosenfeld is an oboist with the Kensington Symphony, West County Winds, and Pacific Wind Ensemble. He is a freelance science journalist and author of the recent book, Eye of the Storm: Inside the World's Deadliest Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Blizzards.)

©2000 Jeff Rosenfeld, all rights reserved