Here we have a pair of individually planned recitals of violin and piano music, contrasted in style and character. Anne Akiko Meyers offers a very personal choice, a seductively exotic collection centred around a fresh and spontaneous performance of Schubert’s Fantasy in C major. Here her sensitive partner pianist, Akira Eguchi, often takes a leading role with ready virtuosity, and they both show a real feeling for the changing moods of this small-scale masterpiece. Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel has a beguiling piano part like falling drops of water, and the two Piazzolla tango-style pieces contrast Latin rhythmic sparkle and lyrical Argentinian ardour. The surprise is Messiaen’s Fantaisie, an early work written as a gift for the composer’s first wife in 1933, unpredictably rhapsodic, vibrant, not in the least typical of the composer’s later music. All in all a stimulating musical exploration.

Tasmin Little’s recital is framed by the dashingly gutsy Kreisler Praeludium and Allegro, and Bartók’s volatile and piquant Romanian Folk Dances. The central section is made up of three sonatas. The two inner movements of the Bach are most engagingly contrasted and full of character, and each sonata seems to lead on naturally to the next. The second movement of Mozart’s K296 is memorably songful in contrast to the crisply classical opening and vivacious finale, while the slow movement of Grieg G major work has that ravishing simplicity which underpins all his lyrical music, and the finale brings the folksy colouring that we recognise from his orchestral works. Little uses two different violins: a Guadagnini and a Stradivarius. They both sound marvellous; but then so does Miss Meyers’s unnamed instrument, for of course it is the calibre of the playing itself that creates beauty of timbre.