By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • October 6, 2014

Artists, writers and composers have always kept an eye on each others’ work, looking for inspiration, insight or just ideas to poach. The Phillips Collection’s new exhibit, “Neo-Impressionism and the Dream of Realities: Painting, Poetry, Music,” explores those crosscurrents in the Paris and Brussels of the late 19th century, and the museum opened its annual concert season Sunday afternoon with works by Gabriel Fauré, César Franck and Germaine Tailleferre, composers of the same general period as the pointillist painters.

Irina NuzovaThe concert (by members of the Phillips Camerata) began with Fauré’s Theme and Variations for Piano, Op. 73, a work from 1895 that, in its delicate, shifting interplay of color and light, perhaps best reflected the pointillist spirit. Pianist Irina Nuzova turned in an utterly beguiling performance, with a deft, near-weightless touch that allowed each variation to blossom and evolve effortlessly into the next. It was a genuinely poetic performance, from a pianist of uncommon gifts.

A quartet led by violinist Olivia Hajioff followed with Tailleferre’s youthful String Quartet. Written in 1919, the piece came a good 20 years after the neo-impressionist heyday, but never mind: Any excuse to hear this gifted composer, who’s never quite risen to the stature she deserves, is welcome. Tailleferre was a friend of Maurice Ravel’s, and her quartet echoes his more famous one in many ways. But it’s a wonderfully imaginative, vivid work in its own right — full of color, sensuality and unusual textures — and Hajioff’s lean, intelligent playing brought it very much alive.

The most passionate playing of the afternoon, though, came in Franck’s String Quartet in D, from 1889. The work is lush, lyrical and thoroughly romantic, and the ensemble gave it a suitably windswept (and often stormy) reading, from the sweeping opening to the anguished Larghetto to the explosive finale, with its virtuosic interplay among all the players. The superb Karen Johnson on first violin — whose tone is so full and rich you could cut it with a knife — played with absolute confidence and ferocity.