Cellist Susan Babini triumphs over WHYY civic-space distractions

Competing with pantomiming images of Barney and Bob the Builder on nearby TV monitors, the ambient sound of office chatter, and a loudly whooshing air-handling system, Susan Babini was up against more than what might be reasonably expected for her hour-long recital Thursday morning - which made the cellist's arresting performance of Schumann, Brahms and Beethoven all the more remarkable.

Babini, an affiliate of Astral Artist Services, was a last-minute substitute for violist Teng Li, who called in sick for the Academy Ballroom Morning Musicales series. No Teng Li, and, this time, no ballroom: The Academy of Music's little mirrored Hall of Versailles is closed for a 15-month renovation, so the West Philadelphia Committee for the Philadelphia Orchestra, which puts on these concerts, decamped for WHYY, across from Independence Mall. (Next season the group can be found at the Curtis Institute of Music.)

WHYY offered to tape Thursday's concert for its digital arts channel, a nice enticement, to be sure. But in a grand euphemism, what the TV and radio station calls its "civic space" is really a lobby. A black curtain was put up to separate the concert area from the reception area, but no acoustical barriers were erected to keep ambient office noise at bay.

One can only imagine what Babini might have sounded like in a quiet, resonant venue. The life-span of her sounds, and those of her fine pianist, Noreen Cassidy-Polera, was startling short. But how lovely and hopefully did they begin their existence.

Babini, 31, a North Jerseyan, is one of those artists for whom thoughtful charisma carries more weight than extroverted gesture. She has a tone of great purity. Her intonation in Schumann's

Adagio and Allegro

was so sensitively calibrated that notes doubled with the piano often made the two sounds indistinguishable.

Babini made subtle manipulations in her color amid a generally gorgeous, deep sound in Beethoven's

Cello Sonata No. 4 in C major (Op. 102, No. 1

).

But there was something in her Brahms

Cello Sonata in F major (Op. 99

) that pointed to an emerging bigness in her personality - a liquid sense of phrasing that became quite emotional. It was all very individual and refined, which had the wonderfully paradoxical effect of making strong statements in a quiet voice.