The idea of a Sunday afternoon concert, which has proved so successful with the Cake & Concert Series at Inverness Cathedral seems to have hit the mark with the Nairn public too as a capacity audience turned out to hear the latest Music Nairn event, a recital of music for cello and piano.  Due to family illness, Daniel Tong had to be replaced at the last minute by Huw Watkins, but as Watkins plays regularly with the cellist Robin Michael, and indeed the two had previously performed three out of the four programmed items, we were in for a treat.  The concert opened with the second Cello Sonata by Gabriel Fauré, a late work from the same period as the second Piano Quintet, when due to the composer's failing health and increasing hearing problems his music increasingly took on an elusive, transcendental quality.  It opens with an obsessive canonic movement in which the cello seems relentlessly to pursue the piano.  The slow movement is a solemn almost funereal Andante, although some consolation and even happiness is established as the piece emerges into the light in the concluding Allegro vivo.  Michael's expressive cello playing was beautifully supported throughout by Watkins' apparently effortless virtuosity on the piano.

The pair's technical virtuosity was put to the test in the second of Mendelssohn's Cello Sonatas, a work of wonderful flamboyance and lyricism.  Sadly underperformed, probably largely due to the challenges of Mendelssohn's piano writing, this work proved engaging and highly expressive, receiving a bravura performance from the duo.  Particularly memorable was the magnificent Adagio, in which huge rippling chords outlined a Bach-like chorale on the piano while the cello seemed to interrogate this using a recitative texture.  That this is an inner debate between Lutheranism and Judaism is an attractive idea, but seems a bit fanciful as the cello line does little to evoke Jewish tonalities. 

The second half opened with the extraordinary La Lugubre Gondola, a darkly disturbing piano piece by Franz Liszt later adapted for piano and cello, which sprang directly from a premonition experienced by the composer of the death of his son-in-law, Richard Wagner.  It depicts a funeral gondola in Venice, and the power of this vision was subsequently supercharged by the actual death of Wagner six months later - in Venice.  Liszt returned to this haunting work again and again, obsessively reworking it for different instruments, and in addition to allusions to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, musicians of later generations have heard presage of later masters such as Janacek and even Schoenberg in this remarkable music.

The concert concluded with a third masterpiece of the cello and piano repertoire, the first Cello Sonata by Johannes Brahms.  Composed less than twenty years after the Mendelssohn, this work inhabits a rich late-Romantic sound-world, and although Brahms was not yet thirty he already demonstrates a sureness of touch which is hugely impressive.  The symphonic aspirations of the opening Allegro non troppo seem to have persuaded the young composer to drop the planned slow movement and to create instead a three-movement form with a curiously conservative central Minuetto.  The rich lower register and plangent tenor range of the cello complemented the full piano writing in a towering performance by the duo.  Sustained applause elicited a tuneful encore, an arrangement for cello and piano of one of six nocturnes for piano by Franz Liszt entitled Consolations.