The convention of billing "soloists" in larger letters than their "accompanists" makes little sense: with such perfectly matched players as Kyung-Wha Chung (violin) and Itamar Golan (piano), it makes less. In the case of Mozart's Violin Sonata in A, which in everything but name is a sonata for piano with violin accompaniment, it is the pianist who should be singled out, if anybody; but when two such players are so completely at one with the music and with each other, such distinctions are at best misleading.

Mozart's Violin Sonata in A, which opened last Sunday's recital in the NCH, is a work of great strength but also of great fragility - one feels that it could be wrecked by a single misplaced accent. It was played with the utmost intentness and a restrained refinement through which one could imagine one was hearing the very voice of the composer, undistorted by the passage of centuries. Prokofiev's Violin Sonata in F Minor was equally refined and equally intent. The savagery of the second and fourth movements was perhaps a little muted, but the aim of the performance was to allow the music to speak for itself, in all its contrasts of mood and dynamics, and not to bear down on an audience.

The Three Slavonic Dances by Dvorak which Kreisler arranged for violin and piano were played with a seriousness that did not wholly suit them. Enescu's Violin Sonata No 3 "in the popular Romanian character" is quite a showy piece but it was played without a taint of showmanship. The Romanian character was evident but transformed, as was the composer's intention, into a music more at home in the concert hall than the village square and presented with an unassertive mastery of its melodic and rhythmic idiom.