The star power of Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax draws a crowd in Verizon Hall

Almost no one else in the classical music business is worshiped the way Yo-Yo Ma is. If you doubt it, just think about how many other times a Verizon Hall audience has raised the roof the way Saturday’s did for what was essentially a chamber music concert.

I say essentially because this performance was something more. Ma and pianist Emanuel Ax hosted the evening like a couple of hams. They introduced pieces with a folksy touch, joked about how many more notes there were for the pianist than the cellist in a Brahms sonata, and placed a bobblehead of conductor Yannick Nézet-Seguin piano-top for the duration of the concert.

Classical music humor. It’s subtle.

Ma enjoys a stature and friendly veneer acquired through decades of crossover adventures and things like giving fiddle lessons to Elmo. His personality fills the room. But where did his music go Saturday night?

The concert was one in a small series of recitals the Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center, Inc. is now presenting in Verizon Hall. Ma and Ax were to have been joined by violinist Leonidas Kavakos, who called in sick a week or so ago. The venue may be good for the economics of presenting; the 2,500 seats of Verizon Hall allow for certain stars whose appearance in the 600-or-so-seat Perelman would be harder to finance. Ma’s name proved capable of filling the place.

But Verizon is not an ideal chamber music venue. While a small number of listeners were able to sit on stage, most of us experienced the musicians at a slight remove, both visually and aurally.

Ax had a bigger presence than Ma. Verizon Hall has always been flattering to the piano’s sound, and here was a pianist with a bloom so gorgeous it didn’t need any extra help. Ax is an unassuming figure, using minimal movement, which makes his incandescent sound seem mysterious. He manages volume without any harshness or percussiveness — as in his pearly passagework of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 3 in A Major.

But if you formed your performance ideal of this piece through Jacqueline du Pré’s lens of heroism, Ma offered an alternative view. In this piece, and in most of the program, the cellist used a lighter touch and drier articulation than du Pré and her contemporaries. He sometimes made you lean forward in your seat to discern the artist.

The approach made sense in Beethoven’s marvelously lighthearted-to-poignant Variations on “Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen” from The Magic Flute. I expected a different sound, a more modern heft, in the Brahms Cello Sonata No. 2 in F Major. But even in this Romantic piece, Ma retained his lower-impact presence and articulation. Ax consistently dug into the emotion in a deeper way, though Ma ended the slow second movement movingly with a diminuendo so quiet it trailed off into infinity.

Ma saved his most sustained, lyrical sound for the encore, a cello-piano transcription of the “Adagio” from Brahms’s Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 3 in D Minor. The musicians dedicated the tender, elegiac movement to Rafael Viñoly, the Kimmel Center’s New York architect who died unexpectedly on March 2.

Viñoly wasn’t the hall’s acoustician, and Verizon was the answer to an orchestral (not a chamber music) problem in the city. But Ma and Ax helped open this hall in 2001 in a Beethoven Triple Concerto with Itzhak Perlman, and have earned the right to be a little fanciful. In any case, as the duo accepted applause and Ma raised his hands midair to applaud the hall itself, you had no problem accepting the idea that we were all lucky to find ourselves together in this place at this moment.

Next season, in 2024, in the Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center’s Spotlight Series: Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Kathryn Stott, April 12; pianist Yuja Wang, April 30; and pianist Evgeny Kissin, May 15. Subscription packages for the trio of concerts range from $154 to $456 plus fees. philorch.org, 215-893-1955.