It's quite an achievement for a piano duo making its Wigmore debut to fill the hall on a hot July evening with a programme of 20th and 21st-century works for two pianos. The nearest to repertory pieces in Cassie Yukawa and Rosey Chan's recital were Rachmaninov's Second Suite and Lutos-lawski's Paganini Variations. Both halves began with contemporary Bach arrangements: one was Phillip Neil Martin's grand, Busoni-like transcription of the C minor Prelude from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, but the other was a far more substantial selection from Robin Holloway's Gilded Goldbergs, his wonderfully imaginative and sometimes positively playful expansions of the Goldberg Variations.
In both pieces, Yukawa and Chan showed that they have the knack of conveying their enthusiasm for the music in bold, ear-catching gestures. Their playing isn't always subtle - in the Rachmaninov Suite more variation of tone colour and touch would have worked wonders - but it is unfailingly accurate and always rhythmically alive.
They relished the buzz of overtones in Henri Dutilleux's Figures de Résonances and its tightly interlocked mosaic of fragments, as well as its glistening sheen of keyboard colour, and launched a full-blooded assault on an arrangement of Piazzolla's Fugay Misterioso.
Anthony Powers's Flyer was written for the duo's appearance in the Park Lane Group's young artists series at the South Bank in January, and certainly its frisky textures and unpredictable changes of direction seem well suited to this particular partnership. Yukawa and Chan had a British premiere up their sleeves, too: Louis Andriessen's two-year-old The Hague Hacking. This begins with dense counterpoint, then breaks out in a sharp exchange of chords between the two instruments that never really resolve; it eventually runs out of energy and comes to an abrupt end.