Violist David Aaron Carpenter, featured Dec. 7 in the Honolulu Chamber Music Series, is tall and young, with striking good looks — dark hair framing a pale face, a sharp-lined jaw, aquiline nose, arched brows, expressive eyes — and extraordinary talent. Reed-slender, clad all in black, he resembled a young Liszt with Paganini flair.

Is it any wonder he is a sensation?

Although only 22, Carpenter suggests great promise. Star performers are not only fine musicians, any more than they are only fascinating characters.

They must somehow be both, persona and performer intertwining in unforgettable ways. They play with laser focus, fully engaged in the music.

They convey musical meaning as much through force of character and nuance of movement as through sound. Movement in turn slips stealthily into sound, intensifying gestures so that they echo within us.

And having watched such performers, we forever after "hear" their gestures in the music, and swear we can hear, for example, not just the attack, but the lunge that initiated it. It is a magician's art, beguiling and bewitching.

At his concert, Carpenter was riveting, dancing and swaying in dramatic expression. Except for the fact that he played the viola and not the violin, his playing bore more than a passing resemblance to descriptions of Paganini's.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of Carpenter's playing was his breadth of timbre. Even in ordinary hands, the viola has a sensual richness and warmth that imitates the human voice, but in Carpenter's hands, it became his voice. It laughed and whispered, growled and sang.

Most unusually, Carpenter occasionally made his viola sound breathy, like Marilyn Monroe, or smoky, like Sarah Vaughan, as well as the more typical clear or robust timbres. "Breathy" is a timbre string players generally avoid, but Carpenter used it for expressive effect, so that he seemed almost to be singing through his viola.

Carpenter did not play alone, of course: his pianist, Julien Quentin, proved to be the consummate accompanist. He accommodated Carpenter's flexible tempos, providing deft support and a solid musical partnership without ever intruding upon Carpenter's persona.

Some of the piano's virtuosic passages rivaled in difficulty those for the viola, yet Quentin breezed through without drawing attention to them.

Carpenter and Quentin were at their best in contemporary works and dramatic passages. In fact, Arvo Part's "Fratres" for viola was even better than an earlier version for violin. Concert highlights included Rebecca Clarke's viola sonata and an arrangement of Astor Piazzolla's "Le Grand Tango."

Carpenter clearly enjoyed Manuel de Falla's "Suite Populaire Espagnole," presenting a strongly personalized reading, and closed the evening with vivid scenes from Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" ballet, followed by a particularly apt Paganini encore.

The Honolulu Chamber Music Series continues in January with one of classical music's best-known star performers, pianist Leon Fleisher, a prodigy who has been performing since he was 6 years old, 74 years ago.