Even from the encores violinist Gidon Kremer chose for his Royal Festival Hall recital, it was clear that this was no ordinary virtuoso programme. Nino Rota's Improvisation, voluptuously romantic though it may be, is hardly a hackneyed old warhorse. Yet Rota's work seemed conservative beside the next party-piece that Kremer offered: Giya Kancheli's Rag-Gidon-Time, written, as its title suggests, by the Georgian composer for Kremer himself. A halting deconstruction of cliched ragtime melody, the work was a weird game of musical co-ordination between Kremer and his pianist, Oleg Maisenberg, who stood warily at the keyboard.
This exploration of the uncharted regions of the repertory is typical of Kremer, who has long refused to conform to a conventional solo violinist's career. Although the main part of the concert presented more standard works - sonatas by Ravel and Brahms - Kremer's playing revealed the unfamiliar, even bizarre, aspects of the music.
Brahms's First Violin Sonata was an essay in twilit, ominous colours. If the surface of this performance was an intimate continuity, Kremer and Maisenberg hinted at darker undercurrents in the first movement's flickering transitions and the lugubrious melancholy of the second.
Where the Brahms was subtly discomfiting, Kremer's interpretation of Ravel's Violin Sonata illuminated the music's surrealist core. The sonata is a succession of musical contradictions. The first movement's flow is offset by the quixotic relationship between the two parts. Kremer and Maisenberg caught the poise of Ravel's elegant discontinuity, as they did the stark rhythmic experiments of the second movement, Blues. Kremer projected the finale - a paradoxical perpetuum mobile whose swirls of notes are trapped in incessant circular patterns - with brilliant imagination.
In any other concert, Beethoven's variations on Se vuol ballare - Figaro's subversive aria from the first act of Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro - would have functioned as a traditionally extrovert curtain-raiser. But in Kremer and Maisenberg's hands, the work approached the explosive fragmentation of modernist composition.
Kremer and Maisenberg deliberately eschewed beauty of sound in favour of vivid characterisation; whether in Kremer's grotesque parody of a courtly menuet, or Maisenberg's splashily virtuosic cadenza. They realised superbly Beethoven's testing of their instrumental limits - and the far from genteel spirit behind the piece.
The Romanian composer Georges Enescu's rarely heard Impressions d'Enfance completed the programme, with nostalgic, if over-long, fantasy.
