By Aaron Keebaugh

Performing with the Boston Landmarks Orchestra, dynamic Canadian violinist Adrian Anantawan made music by Astor Piazzolla and Florence Price burn blue hot.

Violinist Adrian Anantawan and Boston Landmarks Orchestra conductor Christopher Wilkins. Photo: Michael Dwyer

What do the music of Mozart, Eubie Blake, William Grant Still, and Astor Piazzolla have in common? Their lean and energetic textures? Or a flair for dancing rhythms?

For Christopher Wilkins and the Boston Landmarks Orchestra, these composers share an additional penchant for dramatic tension that smooths into an inevitable solace. Those were but two of the insights conveyed by the band’s vibrant performances at the Hatch Shell last week.

But the biggest takeaway was Adrian Anantawan, the dynamic Canadian violinist who made music by Piazzolla and Florence Price burn blue hot.

The subject of an in-depth profile in last week’s Boston Globe, Anantawan has been a key figure in Boston’s classical scene for some time. He now works with the enterprising Shelter Music Boston, which stages performances at homeless shelters, serving populations who have neither the access nor the means of attending most concerts.

Even when he performs in more conventional settings, Anantawan makes any unfamiliar score feel that much fresher and livelier. His technique is flawless and his interpretations are probing. He shades his tone with enough grain to invest the music’s lines with robust intensity. In Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, for example, he cut the figure of a village fiddler, tossing off arpeggios and scales with near flippant ease. “Verano perteño” (summer) featured him trading, with outsized vigor, lively passages with the orchestra, while “Ontoño perteño” (autumn) was treated with greater introspection. Cellist Aron Zelkowicz briefly took the limelight, supplying his customarily seductive lyricism, which Anantawan answered sensitively. All the while, Wilkins and orchestra framed the two soloists with icy dissonances.

Price’s brief song “Adoration” delivered more tenderness, with Anantawan and the orchestra joining together in sweet serenity.

Other works supplied a dash of humor. William Grant Still’s “Can’t You Line ‘Em” charged forward surrounded by the percussive thuds emanating from the ensemble. Accents pounded like hammers on rail spikes, a fitting treatment given that a work song served as Still’s inspiration.

Eubie Blake’s overture to Shuffle Along tipped the program’s balance back toward festive zest. Adding to the energy: Arturo Marquez’s popular Danzón No. 2 burst forth with brio. In both pieces, Wilkins and the Landmarks Orchestra played with the foot-tapping panache of a jam band.

Boston Landmarks Orchestra and Christopher Wilkins taking a bow. Photo: Michael Dwyer

The first half of the program, which paired music by Mozart and Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint Georges, beamed with youthful zeal.

Wilkins’s nimble approach was a custom fit Mozart. The latter was 16 when he composed the overture to his opera Lucio Silla and 18 when he wrote his Symphony No. 29. Both scores, driven by youthful flair, filled the Hatch Shell with sounds of tittering joy. But there were wide emotional sweeps in the music as well. The overture, for example, found the conductor leaning into every shift in mood without distorting the piece’s formal balance. In the symphony, he led with an eye on delivering on the final payoff. Even the pauses in the Andante managed to carry emotional weight. That said, in a few moments the orchestra faltered on the rhythms, with some lines jolting fitfully out of sync.

But everything came together in Joseph Bologne’s ballet music from his The Anonymous Lover, levity nicely interwoven with lilt. As with Mozart, Bologne’s music is at its most vibrant when it is allowed to dance freely.

Aaron Keebaugh has been a classical music critic in Boston since 2012. His work has been featured in the Musical Times, Corymbus, Boston Classical Review, Early Music America, and BBC Radio 3. A musicologist, he teaches at North Shore Community College in both Danvers and Lynn.