Chamber Music Columbus presented the husband-wife team of cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han in the fifth concert of its 2005-06 season last night. The program of music by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Debussy and Benjamin Britten was a compendium of some of the most stunning music for cello and piano, and was offered up in performances of unsurpassable accomplishment.

It would be difficult not to apply superlatives to everything Finckel and Han played last night. Both are extraordinary musicians. Finckel, who performed the entire concert from memory, is simply unencumbered by the more picayune challenges of intonation, sound quality and rapid finger technique that so often get the better of lesser cellists. Han plays with impeccable technique and an incomparably expressive palette.

Together, Finckel and Han are a formidable duo whose interpretations reach listeners with clarity and force.

The musicians greeted the Southern Theatre audience with wonderfully warm sounds in the Adagio of Bach’s Sonata in G Major for viola da gamba, BWV 1027. The duo gave beautiful shape to his hypnotic Andante.

Finckel introduced the first movement, Allegro ma non tanto, of Beethoven’s Sonata in A Major for Cello and Piano, Op. 69, with a gorgeous strand of silken solo cello sound. Han and Finckel captured the mysteriousness of Beethoven’s spartan retransition in hauntingly subdued tones.

Throughout Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro, the duo’s sounds surged and disappeared in a fluid chiaroscuro.

Even at exuberant moments of the second-movement Scherzo, the duo never sacrificed the elegance of their interpretation. In the Allegro vivace, both displayed glittering technical passages.

Performers must walk on egg shells in order to create the exotic atmospheres Debussy’s sound world conjures. Finckel and Han exhibited wonderful ensemble work in the quixotic third movement, Serenade, of Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano. Every subtlety in dynamics and tone color was ideal.

The musicians made the disjunct beginning of the Dialogo of Britten’s Sonata in C Major for Cello and Piano, Op. 65 into a beautifully integrated musical line.

There are surely different interpretations of these masterworks for cello and piano, but almost as surely none could be better.