The Library of Congress hosts the best free concert series in Washington. The 81st season got officially under way last night when the Beaux Arts Trio came to town. Since the group combined founding pianist Menahem Pressler (age 82) with cellist Antonio Meneses and violinist Daniel Hope in 2002, I have heard them twice, at the Library of Congress in 2004 and at the National Gallery in 2005. The group continues to uphold the name the trio made for itself in its heyday, and it was admirably continued last night.

The emotional climax of the program was a bone-chilling performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s second piano trio, op. 67, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Russian composer’s birth this year. The group played this piece in their last concert at the Library, but this time the playing was much more haunting. This trio, based on Russian folk themes, is infused with the composer’s inconsolable sorrow over the death of his friend, musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky.

Shostakovich’s sadness at the death of his friend, who was Jewish, was compounded when the composer heard reports that Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were being forced to dance beside their graves before being shot. The Beaux Arts Trio played the second movement as something terrifyingly barbaric, filled with a blood-in-the-mouth kind of rawness and savagery. The third movement was a somber lament, and the fourth a dance of death that was suave and lithe at times, and at others a-clatter with the sound of angry skeletons dancing beside their graves.