If all you knew about the musical Kanneh-Mason family were the exploits of the young cellist Sheku — hisviral performanceat last year’s royal wedding, say, or his acclaim as the first black artist to be named the BBC Young Musician of the Year — you might imagine that he was the headliner in the splendid recital presented on Wednesday, Dec. 4, and that his pianist sister Isata was the sidekick.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

There were plenty of delights on offer during the course of the evening, presented by Cal Performances in Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall — lively programming, a fresh and thoughtful approach to a range of music, even an encore that was charming and show-offy in an unexpected way. But perhaps the most striking aspect of Wednesday’s recital was to witness a performing partnership of such effortless unanimity.

At every point in the proceedings, the Kanneh-Mason siblings operated as if from a single artistic consciousness. One of them would propose a phrasing or tweak in tempo, and the other would pick it up without a second’s hesitation. Their eyes never met; it would have seemed superfluous.

And sure, family is family. But I’m not that startlingly simpatico with my siblings, are you?

Even where the performers diverged slightly in their approaches, the results felt winningly complementary. Sheku’s playing is bright, fluid and ingratiating almost to a fault — even in music as gritty and determined as Lutoslawski’s somber “Grave,” he’s always ready to look on the sunny side.

与此同时,Isata似乎是李ttle more in tune with the darker recesses of the Romantic sensibility. Her playing is as nimble and crisp as her brother’s, but there’s an extra helping of gravitas to it that brings much-needed weight to the duo.

That combination proved most compelling in the broad expanses of Rachmaninoff’s Cello Sonata, which occupied the second half of the recital. It’s a fascinatingly ambivalent score — by turns stormy and serene — and the duo caught all of its shifting allegiances beautifully. The angsty emotionalism of the two outer movements were perfectly balanced by the brisk rhythmic impulse of the scherzo and best of all by the light-footed, unerring beauty of the slow movement.

Barber’s Cello Sonata before intermission felt like a prologue to the Rachmaninoff, covering somewhat similar expressive turf in thinner form. The program opened with Beethoven’s Variations on Mozart’s “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen,” in a stroke seemingly designed simply to ease everyone into the recital.

但是有一些谨慎的公关工作ogramming decision, which became clear when the Kanneh-Masons returned for an encore. This turned out to be their own arrangement of the English Christmas carol “In the Bleak Midwinter” — a witty and superbly lovely set of variations modeled explicitly on Beethoven’s variation technique.

It takes an impressive amount of nerve to summon up your own shout-out to Beethoven. The Kanneh-Masons — both of them — have that kind of daring, and the skills to pull it off.