Gretchen Dunsmore and Lynda Cochrane at Hopetoun Alpha

By WILLIAM DART

From the opening clarinet phrases of Lyell Cresswell's Triptych, slipping like the snakiest of blues over implacable piano chords, clarinettist Gretchen Dunsmore and pianist Lynda Cochrane had their audience rapt.

This was an evening of virtuosity and poetry in equal parts. Peter Maxwell Davies' Hymnos, at its most unbridled, unleashed vituperative clarinet shrieks while Cochrane took her forearm to the unsuspecting keys. Balancing the bracing cacophony were utterances of spiderweb fragility.

Much of the concert explored the many shades between whisper and inaudibility, and this is territory these musicians know well. Harrison Birtwhistle's Verses showed Dunsmore discovering worlds of subtle shadings within single, sustained notes.

Her account of Berio's Lied, for solo clarinet, enchanted. There was no mistaking that this miniature came from the pen of an Italian composer with the melodic luxuriance of its lines and those Monteverdian stutters.

The oldest and one of the two most substantial offerings was Hindemith's 1939 Sonata, a work of great serenity, blooming in the self-generating beauties of its slow movement. Yet the spiky scherzo reminded that Hindemith the man was hip to the films of Walt Disney, and the musicians delivered it with a snap and crackle cartoon composer Carl Stalling would have been taken by.

For me, Helen Bowater's Ixion's Wheel stood alongside the Hindemith as one of the peaks of the evening. In its early pages, when the clarinet melody unfolded over sumptuous piano harmonies, the musicians measured every gesture and weighed every chord to perfection.

The inexorable spinning of the wheel that punishes one of the great sinners of Greek mythology fuels some vivid writing, and Cochrane made the most of the slightly kooky boogie bass she was given at one point. In the final pages, Dunsmore showed, yet again, a rare and enviable sensitivity to timbral finesse.

The Edinburgh-based Cochrane punctuated the evening with some fey and folkish piano pieces by the veteran Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson.

Possessed fiddler's reels and wistful lullabies contributed a sorbet-like tang to a particularly substantial and satisfying programme.