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Wigmore Hall, London
Thomas Zehetmair's last Wigmore concert this season was a recital of violin-viola duets with Ruth Killius, exploring a repertoire that is striking if often patchy. The Romantics, fazed, one suspects, by the inevitable austerities of sound and counterpoint, avoided the combination altogether. But Mozart wrote two notable works in the form, several 20th-century composers returned to it, and Zehetmair and Killius have also expanded its potential with new commissions.
Mozart's Duos in G and B Flat, K 423 and 424 respectively, were the centrepieces of the evening. Big, expansive works, they formed a fine showcase for Zehetmair's dark lyricism and Killius's richness of approach and tone. Yet the balance between the players is uneven, with the violist sometimes pushed towards the role of an accompanist. To hear Killius come into her own, we have to turn to 20th-century music.
Nikos Skalkottas's Duo and Martinů's Three Madrigals put the instruments on an even footing. Skalkottas studied with Weill and Schoenberg, though his music is closer to Bartók in its tang and drive. Martinů's deceptively titled madrigals were as much duels as duets, their thematic material flung from player to player with the kind of athletic abandon that only comes from immaculate control.
Zehetmair and Killius commissioned Heinz Holliger's Drei Skizzen in 2006, meanwhile. It opens with the pair of them in eerie harmonic freefall, brings them down to earth with a brief, weighty scherzo and closes with a mysterious Cantate à Six Voix, in which each has to sing wordlessly against their own double-stopped lines. Killius seems to be a better vocalist than Zehetmair: you're left wondering whether the resulting ambiguities of tone are accidental or intentional.
