By Peter Jacobi

The concert that the Lexington Guitar Trio - Christopher Bingcang, Duane Corn and Michael Fogler - played Saturday evening in the cozy John Waldron Arts Center Rose Firebay offered proof that the three know how to play and play together, very well, indeed.

What a sad coda to hear, therefore, at concert's end, that the Lexington, Ky.-based trio is "discontinuing" because member Bingcang is leaving for other pursuits, that what the Bloomington audience had just heard was the last the ensemble would play, that there'll be no more Lexington Guitar Trio, at least unless and until a successor to Bingcang is found.

The three certainly made an engaging group, sensitive as individual musicians, cohesive as a unit and savvy as program builders, managing to encompass music of four centuries as well as a wide swath of geographic territory, all in about 90 minutes of performance.

The bookends were established classics. At the start, the trio essayed an arrangement for guitars of the well known Allegro from Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, played most engagingly, though with occasional breakouts of unwanted squeaks as fingers moved up and down the strings.

At the end, save for a lusty, exhilarating encore titled "Carnavale," the three played stunningly an arrangement by member Michael Fogler of the Brahms "Variations on a Theme of Haydn," 19th-century music based on 18th and shaped, according to Fogler's explanation, from both the original treatment by Brahms for two pianos and the more familiar rewrite for full orchestra. The result was a showcase that not only treated the music respectfully but also gave the musicians opportunities to display both technical virtuosity and musical sensitivity.

In between, the gentlemen from Lexington focused on music of our times. There was a sampling of Astor Piazzola, an item called "L'Evasion," in which the composer sought, as he so often did, to invest the tango with the trappings of serious concert music, here by so distorting the rhythms that the element of dance all but disappeared. Never mind, though: the musicians, in the process, had rich material with which to weave magic, and they did.

Works created for the Lexington received loving attention: "Dragon Dance" and "Sakura Safari" by Portland, Oregon, composer Bryan Johanson, the first a clever hinting at a Chinese dragon as center of a celebration, the other a salute to a Japanese folk song; "Roaming (through 'Red River Valley')" by David Leisner, in which one heard snippets of that old song; a scintillating "Baiao de Gude by the Brazilian Paulo Bellitani, and a neo-romantic "The Final Celebration" by southern Indiana resident James Doane. Not a one lacked value for this listener and - as performed by these compelling instrumentalists - each gained a right to be heard again. Their case had been arrestingly made.