Music

Nicola Benedetti and Alexei Grynyuk

Perth Concert Hall

Keith Bruce

four stars

THERE are few contemporary classical musicians who are as passionate communicators as Scotland's violin star. This recital by Nicola Benedetti and her long-time duo partner (and equally adept foil in the communication department), pianist Alexei Grynyuk, was confessedly a personal goal – a long-promised performance of all three of the Brahms sonatas. But simply playing the pieces without covering the story behind their composition, explaining some of the musical process within their form, as well as the performers' personal relationship with the music, would not be the Benedetti way.

For every one of the Perth Festival audience who knew much of what she said before each of the three pieces, there were many more for whom this presentation of classical music was a revelation – and that experience was not restricted to the large number of astonishingly attentive young people in the audience. A half-hour question and answer session at the end of a two-hour recital showed just how engaged the large audience had been. I have never been at a recital of a challenging programme of chamber music like it.

Nor was my own listening was unaffected by her introductions. The mystery of the shifts in tempo in the central movement of Sonata No.2 made a different experience of that is the most readable and often performed of the three, and its final flourish was all the more dramatic after the way the pair had played the dying fall the same movement of the First Sonata and the plaintively decisive end of its Finale.

There were moments, especially early on, when I wished for a little more delicacy from Grynyuk – or perhaps more emphasis from Benedetti – but by the meatiest fare in the Third Sonata they were making virtuosic music look inspiringly effortless.

Programme repeated at Edinburgh Queen's Hall on Tuesday evening and Glasgow City Halls on Friday.