Violin Sonata in D Op 12 No 1 - Beethoven
Piano Sonata in E Op 109 - Beethoven
Violin Sonata in A Op 47 (Kreutzer) - Beethoven
Great string players, sadly, often perform recitals with house-trained pianists, who meekly obey orders so that the famous name can be cast in the most gratifying light.
It's not a setup that usually helps the music much, any more than the spectacle of two great names competitively jousting for the dominant role.
The French violinist Augustin Dumay and the Portuguese pianist Maria Joao Pires are long-time duo partners and also play chamber music together, in concert and in the recording studio.
Yet their playing of two Beethoven sonatas at the Debis AirFinance Killaloe Music Festival on Thursday did actually have something competitive about it, not in the sense of conflict unresolved, but more in the manner of spoils carefully shared out.
When one player was granted the foreground, the extremity of the other's discretion amounted almost to a kind of withdrawal. The playing was full of give and take, co-ordinated with admirable skill and adroitness, but the essential feeling of connectedness, of entanglement in search of a resolution, was missing.
This Beethoven playing was decisive and clear-cut, but yielded results mostly in black and white.
On her own, in the late Piano Sonata in E, Op. 109, Pires was an altogether more interesting player, richer in nuance and inflection, remarkably fearless in some of the corner-turning transitions, and with a keyboard mastery that offered frequent rushes of tonal ravishment.
Performances of late Beethoven are usually rather more yielding than this, but Pires lacked for nothing in expressive potency, and her handling of the closing variations ran to an awesome force, framed between the gentle statements of the indescribably poignant theme.
