Elena Toponogova and Anna Ziman at the Menuhin Room

Elena Toponogova and Anna Ziman, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, May 17 

Two weeks ago Elena Toponogova played a meditative programme in Chichester Cathedral that could serve as a mindfulness session. With Anna Ziman's violin for company today, there was a variety of tempi and temper and none more so than in the vibrant kaleidoscope of musical ideas that is Greig's Sonata no. 2, op.13, beginning as if in grief but full, rich and powerful before ending in triumphant celebration.

Before that major work, Elena and Anna had begun with an impassioned Romance, op. 23, by Amy Beach. Dvořák's Romantic Pieces, op. 75, next carried the smooth serenity of the first, a three chord blast of strings over rapid piano, an evocation of perhaps a fresh outdoor morning and the pale, shadowy finale.

Back solo, on piano, a reprise of the Frank Bridge Three Sketches heard only so recently made for a comparison of venues with the Menuhin Room creating more intimacy and the Steinway, some might say, outperforming the Chichester Yamaha although acoustics and my unreliable memory might provide reasons for that ahead of any assessment of two fine instruments.

To finish, after the Greig, was the short, gentle reverie of a Nocturne by Lili Boulanger to return us to some less complicated tranquility. 

It is Romanticism wherever one looks, or at least wherever I go, at present. I hadn't realized how much influence one little booklet of poems would have on the zeitgeist. I'm by no means against such things but my title was ironic. All you have to be is 'any good' and in the safe hands of the Menuhin Room and the nearby cathedrals we are not offered anything that isn't.