The Madeleine Festival of the Arts and Humanities continues today with a return visit by Salt Lake's Paradigm Trio.

This will be the third time the trio has performed at the Madeleine Festival since it was founded in 1999. Made up of Kelly Parkinson, violin, Joel Rosenberg, viola, and Jed Moss, piano, the trio gives several local performances throughout the year. (For today's concert, Moss, who is out of the country and unable to join his colleagues, will be replaced by pianist Susan Duehlmeier.) Today's program, "Mozart and More," will celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth.

"We have a great program with wonderful works," Rosenberg said. "With Mozart, you hit the jackpot every time." But he added that the concert won't revolve just around the Austrian composer, although the threesome will be doing one of his major works, the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, K. 364.

"We were asked to play a work by Mozart, and that seemed to be the logical piece to do," he said. Rosenberg and Parkinson have played the Concertante in the past, with the Paradigm Chamber Orchestra. But for today's concert, Duehlmeier will play a piano reduction of the orchestral part.

Bookending the Concertante will be music by Brahms. Without question the most classically structured composer of the second half of the 19th century, Brahms is the obvious choice to be paired with Mozart, Rosenberg said.

The trio will open with the Andante con moto from the Piano Trio in C major, op. 87, and conclude with the String Sextet in B flat major, op. 18, in an arrangement for piano trio by Theodor Kirchner.

Kirchner was a younger contemporary of Brahms, becoming one of the older composer's closest friends. "Kirchner was also a composer, who also arranged many of Brahms' songs for solo piano," Rosenberg said.

The trio arrangements of the sextets weren't done until the 1890s, not too many years before Brahms' death in 1897. Notoriously harsh and self critical, Brahms nevertheless admired what Kirchner accomplished in his trio arrangements. "Brahms liked them very much," Rosenberg said.

Special guest Ardean Watts will preface the concert with commentary on the program. "He's a brilliant man who's very charming and humorous," Rosenberg said. "People love to hear him speak."

Rosenberg has known Watts for decades. "We shared the (conductor's) podium many times with Ballet West, when the Utah Symphony used to play for the ballet. Ardean's been a good friend for many years."

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If you go . . .

What: Paradigm Trio

Where: Cathedral of the Madeleine, 331 E. South Temple

When: Today, 8 p.m.

How much: Free

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E-mail: ereichel@desnews.com