New York Philharmonic clarinetist Anthony McGill returns — with an assist from a shiny new Steinway

Is there a clarinetist anywhere with a sweeter sound than Anthony McGill? It’s not likely.

The New York Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist was in town Sunday for a Philadelphia Chamber Music Society recital at the American Philosophical Society.

There is a lot to love about McGill, who has been a darling here since his student days at the Curtis Institute of Music. And it surely reinforced his rapport with the audience that the pieces he chose centered around subvarieties of a 20th-century repertoire one might call friendly mid-century modern.

The recital came with fringe benefit. It featured an eight-year-old Hamburg Steinway piano bought last month by PCMS and its sister organization, the Marlboro Music Festival. The piano, previously primarily in residence at Carnegie Hall, will now live in APS’ Benjamin Franklin Hall during the concert season and spend its summers in Marlboro. (Pianists Jonathan Biss and Shai Wosner helped to select the instrument.)

Anna Polonsky was the pianist Sunday, and it couldn’t have been a happier meeting of sonorities: McGill’s warm, old-world sound, and a piano of power with not a hint of percussiveness in any register.

And then there was the close rapport between the artists. McGill and Polonsky were of a single mind about sound and phrasing, and shared a general philosophy of amiable modesty. There were surely places in Bernstein’s 1942 Clarinet Sonata where they could have exaggerated the bounce or grown overly bright. But they kept a light touch, letting the angular but never harshly dissonant musical language speak for itself.

The interplay in Lutoslawski’s Dance Preludes was handled in a similarly deft way. McGill rendered the piece’s lyrical writing smoothly expressive.

There’s no question that McGill inhabits the more introspective corners of music comfortably. The middle movement of Copland’s Clarinet Sonata has a nocturnal peace that he caught just right — all the way down to a last note that vanishes into nothingness. But what about more dramatic spots on the emotional scale?

In other parts of the Copland, he intensified his wind speed to push the urgency of the music. In Philippe Gaubert’s Fantaisie for clarinet and piano, he was virtuosic. And in the Clarinet Sonata of Carlos Guastavino from 1970, McGill was as adept in the flourish that ended the first movement as he was in the snappy third.

The language of this music is as direct as Rachmaninoff’s; clarinetist and pianist let that aspect of it breathe, adding more than a few stylish touches of their own.