This week’s Monday Sonatas concert of the Bowdoin International Music Festival, at Studzinski Hall, was sold out. The audience of festival students and regular concert-goers must have sensed that something special was about to take place, and it did.

The program included brilliant, sometimes definitive, performances of four masterworks that probably have never appeared on the same program before.

As befits an international festival, the seven musicians, faculty members and virtuosos in residence, were from six different countries but played together as if they had been rehearsing for months.

It is seldom that one attends a concert with such a sustained high level of musicianship, beginning with an exciting Mendelssohn Violin Sonata in F Major, played by Sergiu Schwartz, violin, and Peter Basquin, piano. Melodic, simply harmonic and pleasant at first hearing, its break-neck speed was managed precisely, with perfect articulation in both parts.

It was hard to choose, but the high point of the evening was the great Cello Sonata of Claude Debussy, played by Yehuda Hanani, cello, and Emma Tahmizian, piano. The performance could not have been more magical.

During the stage setup, someone remarked that the grand piano should have its lid closed, presumably to prevent it from overpowering the cello. Lid-up made a world of difference. Tahmizian’s characteristic attack and power provided just the resonance and overtones that Debussy wanted to make the two instruments sound as one.

The sonata was initially titled, “Pierrot angry at the moon,” but the composer, who disliked written programs, crossed it out. Still, the sonata begins where the prelude “Serenade Interrupted” ends. In this case, however, the unsuccessful serenade becomes tragic rather than humorous. The dissolution of Pierrot is marked in the second movement by a passage whose indication is “con morbidezza.”

After intermission, Jesus Rodriguez Gonzales, one of this year’s virtuosi in residence, gave a fantastic rendition of Hindemith’s Sonata for Solo Viola, Op. 31, No. 4. After a few of the incredible variations in the final movement, one got used to Hindemith’s sometimes brutal and dissonant idiom, to the point where some passages sounded sweetly melodic. 

Even more unusual, and revelatory, was the final Six Etudes in the Form of a Canon, written for pedal piano by Robert Schumann and arranged for two pianos by Claude Debussy.

The pedal piano had 29 pedals to be played with the feet, like those on an organ, requiring two present-day Steinways to duplicate its effect.

I don’t know what liberties Debussy took with the original score, but as performed by Yong Hi Moon and James Giles, it was ravishing – a cascade of melodies better than any other collection by Schumann, with a French clarity and intimacy. It sounded like what one always hopes for in Schumann but never quite receives.

Christopher Hyde’s Classical Beat column appears in the Maine Sunday Telegram. He can be reached at classbeat@netscape.net