Chamber Music Sedona led off its 41st season on Sunday, Nov. 5, with a celebration of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 150th birthday featuring both of his two-piano suites as performed by Roman Rabinovich and Orion Weiss.

Rabinovich warmed up for the Rachmaninoff with Frederic Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantasie in A flat major as an appetizer. This misleadingly-titled polonaise sounds nothing like a polonaise until, perhaps, the very end. Instead, it is a virtuoso composition without heart, too wrapped up in itself to say much of anything. Two sets of ideas played back and forth within the piece, one of which was gentle and meandering while the other was discordant and disappointed. Rabinovich took a direct, crisp approach to the work with little in the way of legato, displaying impressive fingerspitzengefühl — fingertip feel — in his playing.

The first movement of the first Rachmaninoff suite began with tinkling flourishes reminiscent of a waltz beneath the flurries on a winter evening, without in any way being an actual waltz. It was followed by a more dramatic and Romantic second movement, marked in the score as “La nuit … l’amour,” filled with trills and Weiss doing scales up and down the keyboard.

Here there were hints of the future Rachmaninoff — the composer was only 20 years old when he wrote the suite, and it showed. The third movement, which he titled “The Tears,” sounded exactly like its title, very unhappy. Its structure was built on a steadily-repeating four-note motif that caused Weiss, in his preliminary remarks, to compare it to the work of minimalist composer Philip Glass, “but even more beautiful.”

A fast, vigorous allegro maestoso closed the suite and ended all too quickly. Weiss demonstrated a slightly stronger attack than Rabinovich, whose hands moved almost as if he were playing the harpsichord, fingers curved with a buoyant touch.

It was Weiss’ turn to take a solo after intermission, and he chose Alexander Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 4. The Scriabin started out on the lighter side, offering a number of tricks to grab the audience’s attention. It was both a show piece and a conversation between the pianist and his instrument. A busy work filled with the impression of cascading Chinese colors, the sonata incorporated one flight of fantasy after another, with something recognizably familiar emerging every so often, and concluded with a blinding finish.

The composition of Rachmaninoff’s second two-piano suite was separated from the first by eight years of real time and by a corresponding, if not greater, amount of musical time. Here the audience and the pianists were into mature Rachmaninoff territory, with the music showing fire and emotional depth from the outset. Rather than being as deliberately modern as he was in his more juvenile work, Rachmaninoff looked back, making passing reference to Franz Schubert’s lied “Erlkonig.”

In the second movement, the melody alternated between cheery and pensive with vigorous punctuation. Weiss and Rabinovich were getting quite a kick out of the scampering portions.

The third movement had a very Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky feel, easy and lush shading into full and determined. By contrast, the fourth movement was darker and more turbulent and included whirling passages reminiscent of a wild peasant dance, which Weiss and Rabinovich rendered with admirable coordination.

Pairing the two suites from very different periods of Rachmaninoff’s career was an instructive choice that gave the audience a glimpse of his musical evolution. It was also an excellent reminder of the tendency of young artists to show off by being technically clever rather than inspired. In the first suite, Rachmaninoff had been writing just to hear himself write; by the time he sat down to write the second suite, he had learned how to say something with his writing. The central ideas of the later piece had a consistency with each other and a unity with the whole that was absent from the earlier work. It also omitted the hanging about on unresolved chords that recurred throughout the first suite.

As an encore, Rabinovich and Weiss offered a short passage from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C major for four hands, which was both refreshingly approachable after the Rachmaninoff as well as more conversational for the pianists.

Chamber Music Sedona will return to the Sedona Performing Arts Center on Jan. 7 with a performance by violinist Tessa Lark, bassist Michael Thurber and harpist Charles Overton.