Any Schumann program presented last week was sure to go to the heart given the painful and unexplained disappearance of Boston University music professor and Schumann expert John Daverio a week ago Sunday. I was surprised that the introduction to the Janus 21 concert at Longy School of Music on Friday made no mention of Professor Daverio. Perhaps under the circumstances a dedication would not have been appropriate. In any case, the music spoke eloquently.

Andrew Kohji Taylor and Max Levinson opened the program with a high-powered romantic reading of the Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1. Taylor has a cello-like low register and a slight, not unpleasant acidity to his tone (pinot noir Schumann); his long riding coat was an original touch, and his head shaking was more expressive than distracting. Levinson provided forthright accompaniment as an equal partner in the music. The Allegretto second movement brought to mind the Intermezzo from the Schumann Piano Concerto, big sighs alternating with skipping material; the Lebhaft finale alternated folk dance and romance. Composed in 1851, this sonata is a late work, from a time when Schumann was "normalizing" some of his early piano pieces, and not too long before he slipped into madness. Taylor and Levinson made a plausible case, but it still sounded conventional and repetitious.

Levinson returned with tenor Max Calmès for the nine songs from the Opus 24 Liederkreis cycle of 1840. Calmès, a former president and chairman of the Handel & Haydn Society who made his Boston Lyric Opera debut in Madama Butterfly back in 1982, sang with sensitivity but not a big voice. The high notes in "Morgens steh’ ich auf und frage" and "Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen" were thin and wispy; "Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her!" had power but not much depth, "Schöne Wiegen meiner Leiden," with its repeated "Lebe wohl!", feeling without richness. At times "Warte, warte, wilder Schiffsmann" verged on sprechstimme. Levinson’s accompaniment was often too forthright; Calmès might have benefitted from a more introverted partner.

The program culminated with Schumann’s 1837 piano masterpiece Davidsbündlertänze, which he wrote in anticipation of his marriage to Clara Wieck. The Davidsbund, or "League of David," was Schumann’s imaginary society of artists against the philistines; each of the 18 short pieces was "signed" by one or both of Schumann’s two alter egos, dreamy Eusebius and impulsive Florestan. It’s a composition of strong contrasts, and these Levinson exaggerated, sometimes to the detriment of the music. There was no want of tonal beauty in #2, #7, #14, or #17, and I was impressed with how these pieces cohered at his very slow tempos. His #3 had a playful Jean Paul (Schumann’s favorite author) quality at the end; #5 was notable for the clarity of its middle and low voices, #11 for its Kinderscenen innocence. But the thunderous acceleration that ended # 1 seemed calculated, and the subsequent sturm und drang often blurred harmonies and undercut the music’s weight (particularly in #10) and rhythmic idiosyncrasies (particularly in #9). At the end of #8 he played the boring D from the 1851 revision instead of the original D-flat. Levinson’s #16 put me in mind of Roland Barthes’s Kreisleriana essay "Rasch," in which he speaks of a rage that conceals panic: "What I hear are blows: I hear what beats in the body, what beats the body, or better: I hear this body that beats" — but here the beats seemed to come from the pianist’s knuckles rather than his body (just as Calmès seemed sometimes to be singing from his eyebrows). Toward the end of #17, Levinson accelerated so quickly, he left the music behind, and the crucial 12 low C’s that end the work were barely audible and went for nothing. Turbulent, romantic, and an experience, but callow next to the likes of Anda, Kempff, Arrau, Demus, Pollini, and most of all Gordon Boelzner in the Balanchine Library video of Mr. B’s great Robert Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze.