Portuguese pianist Maria Joao Pires has always been admirably keen to break down the traditional formats of classical concerts. Whether she fully succeeds is, however, open to dispute.

This particular concert, in which Pires shared the platform with tenor Rufus Müller and the Brodsky Quartet, was originally envisioned as the first of a series to programme newly commissioned tributes to Schubert alongside a selection of his own works. The new pieces were eventually dropped, however, in favour of an all-Schubert programme, carefully constructed to examine intimations of mortality within his music.

Pires aimed to present the idea of the chamber concert as a kind of informal musical get-together between friends, though it was all too self-consciously done. When she played her solos, some of the other performers draped themselves over chairs in attitudes of rapt attentiveness. Pires did not, however, hang around to listen to anyone else; when the Brodskys played the C minor Quartettsatz and the Death and the Maiden Quartet, they did so alone.

The Brodskys were also playing with a guest leader, Priya Mitchell, whose intonation was excruciating in the Quartettsatz. Fortunately, she had settled somewhat by the end of the evening, and Death and the Maiden was delivered with bleak intensity. Müller, a fine lieder singer, held the audience spellbound with his hushed performance of Litanei auf das Fest aller Seelen, though some of the other songs, notably Der Zwerg, lay fractionally too low for him. Either as accompanist or soloist, Pires remains outstanding in Schubert, combining deep sensitivity with just the requisite streak of emotional toughness. Despite the onstage faffing, she achieved levels of poetic sensitivity in the Impromptus in F minor and A flat that have been matched by few.