Joshua Bell, the young violinist, is one of American classical music’s continuing success stories. He is everywhere, doing everything, and people want to come and hear him play. Carnegie Hall’s 2,800 seats looked pretty much filled on Thursday night when he and his regular partner, Jeremy Denk, played a violin and piano recital. There were no surprises on this program of Tartini, Prokofiev, Dvorak and Grieg, but no one seemed to miss having them.

The Bell-Denk duo serves as a sort of flagship for Bell Inc. The two men share an elegant, untroubled technical facility; genuine musical instincts; and an impetuosity that pushes so hard at music as to knock it off balance occasionally. Yet it takes singular self-confidence to treat the Andante of Prokofiev’s familiar F minor Sonata with such delicacy and elasticity of movement and to make it work in such a big performance space.

All of this music got the same treatment. In the Grieg C minor Sonata, the composer’s moments of rhetorical bombast were greeted by great surges of enthusiasm. But it was again a middle movement — here Grieg’s “Allegro espressivo alla romanza” in all its fresh-faced melodiousness — that you happily remember. Dvorak’s “Four Romantic Pieces” had the charm of simplicity. It is the kind of music these two musicians eat for breakfast.

Tartini’s famous “Devil’s Trill” Sonata, at the start of the evening, was a train wreck for the same reasons that most everything that came after it succeeded. Phrases trampled one another in headlong, rushing blurs of detail. If musicians want to treat Baroque music as a Romantic free-for-all, that is their legitimate privilege. I do think ticket buyers have the right to hear all the notes.