Chamber Music Sedona played a spectacular coda to its season at the Sedona Performing Arts Center on Sunday, April 13, presenting the legendary violinist Pinchas Zukerman with colleagues cellist Amanda Forsyth and pianist Shai Wosner, en route from recent appearances in Berlin, and Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland, in a trio of trios, performing works by Sergei Rachmaninoff, Johannes Brahms and Bedrich Smetana.

Also taking part was Sedona’s Emily Naaktgeboren, whose daughters play in the Sedona Community and Youth Orchestra, who was assisting Wosner with his pages.

“I mean, I was going to turn pages,” Forsyth offered.

“I was going to the bar,” Zukerman retorted.

“I was just going to play an A,” Wosner said, and played.

The threesome started off with the single-movement Rachmaninoff, dominated at first by a weaving throb from the strings that allowed Zukerman and Forsyth to demonstrate the seemingly loose, easy fluidity of their wrists. The piano part felt balanced on a knife-edge, while the strings were already all the way over the edge and crying out in overtones, singing a bitter sweet lament in which the piano had largely a supporting role apart from its solo. It was wonderful to witness Zukerman’s handling of his violin, as if it had grown from him. The cello was assigned the task of sounding ominous even when the piano was being meltingly sweet, and also got some passages that required complex yet sultry fingering. Emotionally, it was high drama, the mood of a 1930s noir film set in the foggy streets of a metropolis. The trio finished low and woody, with the piano stalking off in high dudgeon, Wosner bringing up the rear with his left hand.

The succeeding Brahms trio — No. 2, Op. 87 — turned out to be the least structured of the three. It took some time for a very basic thematic basis to make its way out of the rambling opening. Of special interest in the Brahms trio, however, was the spacing which Brahms incorporated into the string parts of the first movement and the interaction of Zukerman and Forsyth as they played those passages. The violin and cello were frequently in unison, separated by an octave, each serving as an echo of the other. Vigorous chords with the piano as a second and more intricate echo aided the development of the movement’s surge of feeling as it grew steadily more fervent without quite deciding why it felt so strongly.

For the second movement, the mood shifted from confusing to wistful longing, again led by the strings but without the earlier sense of separation. Instead of an echo, it was more like an opera duet, the voices of the strings laden with vibrato, imploring, reproaching and agreeing. The third, in complete contrast yet again, was full of nervous energy, high notes and brilliantly precise feather-light bow-work, although the skittishness tempered briefly to a golden resolution before returning. It was very much witchery-in-the-woods music.

Finally, in the fourth, all three instruments seemed to resolve their difficulties and spun naturally together in a recurrent, powerful theme that felt as if it would go over even more impressively in a symphony. Perhaps Brahms simply didn’t want to spend 15 years on that again. The effect was really very modern and intimate for a Romantic composer.

Following intermission, the artists turned their attention to the all-too-often-neglected Smetana and his G minor trio. In distinction to the Rachmaninoff’s initial over tones, Zukerman commenced with a moving, pure-toned violin solo to introduce an energetic main theme that gave the listener the impression it was one that well-known amateur violinist Sherlock Holmes might have enjoyed playing. This was succeeded by a second and much more pastoral theme, again led by the violin, that kept trading places with the first, the rural and the urban in alternation.

Zukerman and Forsyth again showed off their spectacular wrist action, Forsyth particularly in the short, choppy chords that Smetana was adept at spinning into a constant surge of music. He had a knack for that, but then the calibre of the playing could have been responsible as well, amplifying the nuanced, music box-like effects that Smetana incorporated. It was also uncanny to witness Zukerman’s mating of physical strength to finesse. The Smetana was easily the most interesting work of the afternoon — and that was merely after the moderato.

The initial theme returned in variation in the allegro, but with a different secondary theme that remained folksy, albeit gentle and winding. There were moments of great striving but not grief, with Zukerman half rising to the occasion as the music required it. Smetana’s scoring in the third movement was perhaps still more impressive than the earlier parts of the work, beginning with a dance on the piano reminiscent of a tarantella that he had borrowed from one of his own sonatas and was somehow frustratingly familiar. Wosner maintained a flowing, gently-ascending-and-descending line while the strings chiseled sharply away at it in a skipping, fleeting rush with intense energy boiling beneath the surface. A burst of writing that sounded like the coda of a concerto actually turned out to be a setup for a slow passage. As the trio approached the conclusion, the theme of the dance became briefly dark and shadowed before recovering its gaiety and resolving itself rather classically.

The regular music season in Sedona will close in two more weeks, with performances from Piano on the Rocks from April 25 through 27, the Sedona Symphony’s pops concert on April 26 and the Sedona Community and Youth Orchestra’s spring showcase on April 29.

What Six Degrees of Separation?

Pinchas Zukerman was a student of the Armenian virtuoso Ivan Galamian, who was also the teacher of Mehli Mehta, founder and director of the Bombay Symphony, who was the father of bassist and conductor Zubin Mehta, who would later appear alongside Zukerman — and Itzhak Perlman, Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline du Pre — in “The Trout,” one of the most-watched classical music documentaries in history, in which they performed Franz Schubert’s Trout Quintet, which Chamber Music Sedona featured last month.