Renoir's wonderful "Luncheon of the Boating Party" is back at its home in the Phillips Collection, and to mark its return, Sunday's concert there featured the premiere of Haskell Small's "Renoir's Feast," a study for piano of the personalities immortalized in the painting. The Phillips commissioned the work for the occasion, with Small himself at the piano before an audience full of some of Washington's most distinguished pianists.

This is a big piece, 35 minutes and 23 movements of character sketches tied together by gentle and rolling glimpses of "the river" that shines in the background of Renoir's scene. There is the burly Fournaise, river captain and boat owner who presides over Renoir's canvas and whose musically brusque but cheerful presence sets the tone for the whole group. The actress Ellen Andree is painted suggestively in slightly disheveled jazz colors as she drinks her wine. The Italian journalist Maggiolo's volatility is tempered by his companion actress Angele's calm.

Small's idiom includes a comfortable mix of impressionistic color, jazz and blues inflection, whiffs of Stephen Foster and a sense of improvisatory freedom. Small's personalities are as muted as Renoir's softened outlines. The people he portrays are good friends who share many characteristics, and so the personalities are drawn subtly and cerebrally; you get a sense of companionable conversation and French understatement rather than of enthusiastic partying.

Small almost dared comparison by programming the Mussorgsky "Pictures at an Exhibition" after intermission. Mussorgsky's bold outlines and splashes of color are the antithesis of Small's, with Russian subjects that are larger than life in their exuberance. But Small, approaching this music with a dollop more than usual of introspection and reflection, lacing passages with rubatos and keeping tempos on the slow side, proved that in the right hands, even Mussorgsky has his subtle side.

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