Pianist Adam Marks and violinist Matt Albert performed Monday night. (Kelly Gilliland / The Daily Campus)

Matt Albert’s violin performance was so intense that strands from his bow kept breaking and flailing about his face.

It wasn’t just his bow. You could see the intensity in his facial expressions from the back row.

Both he and Adam Marks’ emotions seemed to mimic the mood of the music they were playing.

The emotion in Marks’ eyes during every piece wasn’t at all hindered by the fact that his profile was facing the audience.

When the tone became angry, the pair’s eyes showed it. So did Matt Albert’s hair.

When his head moved with the violin, his bangs vigorously swept his forehead like a broom.

Before the recital, Marks referred to Albert as “kind of a rock star,” because he played at the Grammy Award Show Sunday night.

He flew in from Los Angeles around 8 a.m. Monday, took a nap and came to perform at SMU.

More than 100 people congregated for the Meadows school’s Faculty and Distinguished Alumni Recital Series featuring Matt Albert on the violin and Adam Marks on the piano.

The two men produced a nearly two hour show that, according to Marks, took a very long time to organize.

They loved each end every piece in the compilation and “they seemed to all fit together perfectly,” Marks said after the show.

The program consisted of some more modern pieces from 1995 and 1997 as well as a piece of work composed by SMU student Michael van der Sloot, who was present in the audience Monday night.

During the silences in between pieces, one could tell that if a single member of the audience even breathed too loudly, the ambiance would be thrown off from the entire recital. The audience anxiously awaited the artists’ next movement.

“If you play an instrument, any Meadows concert will ‘wow’ you,” Phil Davis, a first-year student at SMU, said. “[But] for the non-musical, it was way too long.”

SMU freshman Madeline Ong came to the concert as a requirement for a class called The Art of Listening.

At intermission, Ong’s impression was that she “[was]not falling asleep yet, so that [was] good.”

She liked that there was a good balance between the strength of the piano and violin melodies and that it strayed away from the classical feel you usually get in recitals like this one. Audience members called the show “excellent and interesting.”

“That’s the great thing about Meadows,” SMU professor John Cotton said. “You get to hear things you wouldn’t get to hear otherwise.”