Vadim Repin and Andrei Korobeinikov, Wigmore Hall, review: Recital tests us as much as them

Its first half was a bracing lesson in Soviet musical history

Vadim Repin specialises in classical restraint

Vadim Repin and Maxim Vengerov, close contemporaries, studied with the same teacher in their home town of Novosibirsk. But in the firmament of fiddlers they are like sun and moon, with Vengerov resplendently charismatic and Repin specialising in classical restraint. Repin’s recital at the Wigmore Hall with pianist Andrei Korobeinikov tested us as much as him.

Its first half was a bracing lesson in Soviet musical history, consisting of the violin sonata Alfred Schnittke wrote in 1963 when he was in thrall to then-modish serialism, followed by Prokofiev’s second violin sonata written in 1944. Their playing of the outer movements of the Schnittke took one’s breath away by its sheer power - Repin’s double-stopped figurations scything through the air - but his long passage in high harmonics was brilliantly managed. The Prokofiev sonata – arranged for his friend David Oistrakh to play – was that composer at his most genial.

Then came Bartok’s Rhapsody No 1 BB94a, for which Repin became a village fiddler extracting an inexhaustible variety of colours and characters from his instrument, after which Korobeinikov took the stage for some heavily over-pedalled solo Brahms. Back in harness for Brahms’s Violin Sonata No 3 in D minor, he reverted to form, allowing Repin to take us out in a blaze of magnificence. Their graceful encore was a Ponce salon piece arranged by Heifetz.