For a recital, a violinist gets a big assist from her sister

With the auditorium full and the waiting list long, expectations ran high Sunday at the Philadelphia debut recital of much-touted Munich-born violinist Viviane Hagner. Presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society at the Curtis Institute, Hagner is known from her summers at the Marlboro Music festival. And one can't navigate the European airwaves without stumbling across a broadcast from Geneva of her concertos from Brahms to Berg.

By recital's end, she had played beautifully throughout but with frustrating reticence - though more rarely encountered musical pleasures were in evidence in the program's larger package. Hagner's regular accompanist is her sister, Nicole Hagner, and with that comes the extraordinary rapport of sibling music-making. I call it the Menuhin effect: Violinist Yehudi Menuhin is now best remembered through the recordings he made with his sister Hephzibah.

Before the concert I hadn't taken note of the accompanist situation when I downloaded their Beethoven Violin Sonata No. 7 recording to get a taste of what might happen in the afternoon's performance of the same composer's Violin Sonata No. 9. Immediately, I sensed four hands operated by the same brain. The dovetailing of violin and piano, the way they matched their coloristic palettes, and their joint view of the piece as a whole were not things one hears in more typical performances where the musicians simply take care of their respective sides of the street.

The rambunctiously competitive relationship between violin and piano in Beethoven's ninth sonata (nicknamed "Kreutzer") made this kind of integrated performance less appropriate. But what one did hear was freedom. With so many moving parts in this sonata, musicians often find safety in regimentation. Not these two. When Viviane wanted to step out of the established tempo to make a strong rhetorical pronouncement in the second-movement variations, she did so without so much as taxing the music's architecture, so secure was she in her sister's hands. Too bad there wasn't more of that.

Both showed their technical chops in the Liszt Grand Duo Concertant, going to the ingratiating extremes of their coloristic possibilities. Nicole was particularly distinguished in the way she interpreted written descriptions of Liszt's own playing - not the welter of notes we often hear from modern virtuosos but playing in which everything was accomplished with color.

Bartok's Rhapsody No. 1 and especially Mozart's Violin Sonata K. 304) went quite well, though one was more seized by the short contemporary piece, Michel Galante's 2011 Kreutzerspiel, based on a handful of notes gleaned from the "Kreutzer" sonata.

Galante's intriguing explication of his compositional process told of contradicting simultaneous tempos and lack of any home key. Yet the composer's elegant but rich sense of harmony hailed more from Ravel than Beethoven. In fact, the piece felt more like a moment from a Ravel piece in suspended animation, frozen in time, never moving backward or forward but hanging in the air being examined by the performers from all sides.