By Jonathan Blumhofer

The Belvedere Series is a chamber music group whose mission of bringing the art form to new audiences is matched by an admirable desire to expand and redefine just what the canon is. Even better: that ambition is backed up by top-flight programming, playing, and musicianship.

The Belvedere Series in action. Pianist Ingrid Keller and violinist Dominic Salerni. Photo: David Pearson

Richmond, Virginia, might not be the first place to come to mind as a Mecca for chamber music. Yet with The Belvedere Series, the Commonwealth’s capital boasts a group whose mission of bringing the art form to new audiences is matched by an admirable desire to expand and redefine just what the canon is. Even better: that ambition is backed up by top-flight programming, playing, and musicianship.

Founded by pianist and Massachusetts native Ingrid Keller, the Series is now in its third season. Having recently embarked on an ambitious, years-long commissioning project, it’s also ever-growing.

As if to underline the point, last weekend, the group — whose core membership hails from Virginia and the wider mid-Atlantic region — presented Midnight Twilight, a survey of works by Nordic and Russian composers past and present. Given at Richmond’s historic Marburg House, the concert was part of the Belvedere’s intimate salon series.

By about any measure, the coziness of the venue — a narrow, resonant, high-ceilinged parlor — makes for an immersive, sometimes intense, concertgoing experience. It certainly presents a range of logistical and programming challenges that don’t emerge with bigger spaces. Even so, the musical rewards of the setup are considerable and, on the merits of Sunday’s fête, perhaps more groups and presenting organizations should seriously consider the model.

More than anything, the afternoon’s charged program carried with it a cathartic aspect. For all the tumult and occasional whimsy of its five selections, the program’s immense expressive palette came over with uncompromising, nuanced force. In the process, it lent our own unsettled times some welcome context.

The event was anchored by Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2. Written in the aftermath of Stalin’s purges and as the Great Patriotic War raged, this is music of considerable turmoil tied to the moment of its creation.

Shostakovich’s artistry, however, exceeds a specific epoch. In its weeping and storminess, the Trio’s extremes are well-nigh universal. So, too, its cheeky defiance, perhaps best demonstrated by the finale’s snapping, klezmer-ish passages.

Sunday’s account of the score from Keller, violinist Domenic Salerni, and cellist Andres Sanchez leaned into those latter moments with aplomb. In fact, the apotheosis of that movement seemed, for all its swing and sweep, to take on a life entirely its own.

Throughout, the collective brought an incisively conversational quality to the Trio’s counterpoint. The well-shaped first movement’s climaxes were biting and rhythmically locked-in. So were the Allegro’s raw, insistent attacks.

At the start of the great Largo, Keller drew thundering sonorities from her keyboard. That stentorian introduction, though, resolved into playing of shattering vulnerability and soul from the larger group across the movement’s main body.

Pianist Ingrid Keller. Photo: The Belvedere Series

Similarly absorbing was Pēteris Vasks’s Bass Trip. A virtuoso etude for solo double bass, the score channels a host of techniques and reference points that culminate in a haunting episode during which the soloist sings and whistles above their own pizzicato accompaniment.

The last requirement might be a bridge too far for some players. It most definitely was not for Sam Suggs, who delivered the moment on Sunday with ethereal simplicity. The larger piece, too, emerged in his hands as a riveting demonstration of both the musical flexibility of the instrument and as a compelling illumination of Vasks’s distinctive compositional voice.

Likewise arresting was Polina Nazaykinskaya’s new piano quartet, Ephemera. Essentially a meditation on nostalgia and the passage of time, this 12-minute-long effort fuses old and new with flowing, lyrical ease.

There is certainly an immediate allure built into Ephemera’s essentially diatonic harmonic language.

But this aspect of Nazaykinskaya’s writing neatly belies the rigor of her music’s structural design as well as its intricate rhythmic and contrapuntal schemes; the latter, impressively, never spin their wheels or seem at a loss for where to go next.

On Sunday, Ephemera’s rigors were ably navigated by Keller, Salerni, Sanchez, and violist Danielle Wiebe Burke. In their hands, what emerged was music that far exceeded the sum of its parts: highly idiomatic, richly varied, often impassioned but never descending into bathos. As doesn’t always happen with new music, Sunday’s capacity audience seemed as enthralled with the opus as the players and composer, who was on hand to bask in some well-earned applause.

The afternoon opened with cellist Sanchez teaming up with Keller for a warmly sonorous rendition of Jean Sibelius’s hymnlike Laetare anima mea. Thereafter came a traversal of Edvard Grieg’s Violin Sonata No. 1 featuring the pianist and Salerni.

Though initially derailed by a broken E string, the performance quickly found its happy place. The central Allegretto danced lustily, Salerni gamely teasing out its imitations of hardanger fiddle music. He and Keller were well matched throughout in their articulations, especially during their characterful traversal of the finale’s play of extroversion and reflection.

Though not the afternoon’s only hint of light, the pair’s Grieg performance did call to mind another Nordic artist, poet Jens Peter Jacobsen. “Seht, die Sonne,” he wrote in a text memorably set by Arnold Schoenberg: see, the sun. This weekend it was shining — in more ways than one — on Richmond.

Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer and violist who has been active in the greater Boston area since 2004. His music has received numerous awards and been performed by various ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Kiev Philharmonic, Camerata Chicago, Xanthos Ensemble, and Juventas New Music Group. Since receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 2010, Jon has taught at Clark University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and online for the University of Phoenix, in addition to writing music criticism for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.