Some of the best playing of last season was that of Sergey Schepkin aboard Bargemusic, notably a colorful and passionate performance of “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Saturday evening, he kicked off the Piano Forte series at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium with a program of Brahms and Bach.

Beginning on a rather woody but somewhat opaque Hamburg Steinway, Mr. Schepkin crept into an introspective rendition of Brahms’s Rhapsody in B Minor, Op. 79. His was a cerebral approach with some idiosyncratic phrasing that eschewed the powerful and dramatic in favor of the contemplative. But he more than compensated in the G Minor companion piece, producing a performance of highly taut drama and excitement.

Mr. Schepkin is known as a Bach specialist, and is often described by the critical community as a Glenn Gould clone. I don’t hear this at all, and think of his Bach as closer to the Edwin Fischer type: a strong, modern piano sound, but with plenty of individual dynamics and Romantic tendencies. Where Gould was usually invested in making rhythms exact and note values homogenous, Mr. Schepkin is perfectly willing to treat each utterance as a unique thought with its own sense of musical color. Where Gould strove for expressiveness through uniformity of line, Mr. Schepkin seeks it via individuality of passage.

In the Partita No. 6, this tendency toward Romanticism was powerful. In Mr. Schepkin’s hands, the work is not just spiritual but also descriptive, not just mathematical but also personal. After switching at intermission to a Steinway Street Steinway with a much brighter sound, he launched into Bach’s only piece of outright program music, the “Capriccio on the Departure of His Most Dearly Beloved Brother,” whose title would indicate that the sibling had indeed passed to the next world, when, in actuality, he had only joined the Royal Swedish army as oboist to King Charles XII.

Messrs. Bach and Schepkin had great fun with this rendition, the buoyant sound of the instrument punctuating the jocularity of the occasion. Especially entertaining was the “Fugue in Imitation of the Postilion’s Horn,” a mock marche militaire that put me in mind of the music that accompanies Cherubino’s idea that he will enlist in the army to forget his amorous woes in “The Marriage of Figaro.”

Finally, Mr. Schepkin offered a traversal of the “Seven Fantasias,” Op. 116 of Brahms. Especially moving was the measured and thoughtful Intermezzo in E Major, played lovingly as I envision the composer would have performed it.

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One of the great pieces of archival material from the last century is a video performance of the Trout Quintet featuring five young musicians destined for superstardom. The ensemble – Itzhak Perlman, violin; Pinchas Zukerman, viola; Jacqueline du Pre, cello; Zubin Mehta, bass; and Daniel Barenboim, piano – seems to be a dream team put together by the classical forerunners of MTV. But they were simply a group of good friends and colleagues, and isn’t that what Schubert chamber music is all about?

That same sort of technical mastery and youthful camaraderie was on hand as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center began its Rose Studio series on Thursday evening. Fittingly, on the day new co-artistic directors Wu Han and David Finckel announced that their Chamber Music II program, which offers opportunities to highly skilled young performers, would be expanded to 17 musicians next season, three of this year’s crop – Tai Murray, violin; Clancy Newman, cello; and Benjamin Hochman, piano – presented a tight and disciplined reading of the Haydn Trio in C (Hob. XV:27) that featured a spirited, conversational presto finale.

But the evening turned disappointing once the aspirants were joined for the Trout by veterans Paul Neubauer (viola) and Kurt Muroki (double bass). The Trout is young people’s music, written by one who barely even experienced his own middle age. It is imbued with gemutlichkeit and infectious brio that positively overflow in a superb rendition. But Thursday’s approach was rather severe: This upper-case “c” Classical Schubert sounded more Prussian than Viennese, particularly in the Allegro vivace.

Combining mature artists and young players – the Marlboro approach, if you will – can have a decided downside. The clear standout was young Mr. Newman, who combined a rich sound with healthy vibrato and exhibited just a touch of portamento to counterbalance the stiffness emanating from the keyboard. But Mr. Neubauer’s burnished tone only served to call attention to Ms. Murray’s rather quotidian one, and Mr. Muroki couldn’t resist dominating the proceedings with an alpha-male bass.

Still, the music is so resonant that some of the inevitable camaraderie came through. Years from now, these fine young players will look back at their major New York debut through the roseate memory of the inner ear. At that point, they will agree with James Joyce’s assessment that “there’s no friends like the old friends.”