In lieu of program notes, Mei introduced each piece from the stage. It was strange to hear an exhaustive account of the genesis of Stravinsky's Divertimento that managed never to mention Tchaikovsky (from whose music Stravinsky took most of the melodic material on which the parent piece, Le baiser de la fée — "The Fairy's Kiss" — is based). But then the performance that followed was biased a bit to the Stravinskian side rather than the Tchaikovskian — edgy, not gushy.

Not that there wasn't rich tone when the music demanded it; if it was Mei's bright sound on the E string that most stood out, her command in the lower parts of the instrument was hardly less impressive. But it was the quick, angular parts of the piece that seemed most to engage the duo's imagination — the second-movement "Danses suisses" and, especially, the giddy finale, which they brought off with a sort of controlled mania that was a joy to hear.

If the succeeding Strauss Sonata was less thrilling, it might have been because the control overruled the mania. It was one of those frustrating performances where everything's in place and yet something doesn't quite work. The piece itself is earlyish Strauss at his most exuberantly hormonal — extravagant and lyrical and blustery and altogether delightful in a guilty-pleasures kind of way. The lyrical slow movement retains a certain amount of decorum. The outer movements, though, are just musical rhetoric laid on for the sheer fun of it; and I suspect that they'd require a pair of genuine, shameless musical showoffs really to work. Chiaroscuro was almost as polished as in the first half — though some balance and tuning issues that had popped up intermittently in the Stravinsky seemed worse here. But never mind balance and intonation. This is music for players who stop thinking about balance and intonation as soon as they tear into a piece. Mei and Chanco were both brilliant — they did extraordinary things, as indeed the work demands. But I couldn't help feeling that it would have been a better performance if they'd dared more than they really could do.

The encore was a headlong performance of the finale of Beethoven's Op 30/3.