Gidon Kremer is 60 this year, and his South Bank concert to mark the anniversary was typically self-effacing. Where other great violinists might have favoured London with a stop on a high-profile international concerto tour, Kremer chose to appear in recital with the pianist Oleg Maisenberg in a typically eclectic programme. Schubert's works for violin are by no means a well-known part of his output, or even a very central part of violin literature, but Kremer played three of them, beginning with the Sonata in A major D574, later including the G minor Sonatina D408, and ending with the violin arrangement (probably not by Schubert) of the Variations on the song Trockne Blumen from Die Schöne Müllerin.

All of these works were treated with the affection and consummate musicality that are so characteristic of Kremer at his best. There's never anything self-regarding or attention-seeking about his playing, whether in the gorgeously expansive, typically Schubertian melody that opens the A major sonata, or the whirling, atypical bravura with which the Variations end - his partnership with Maisenberg, equally unshowy and intensely perceptive, was uncanny, too.

Interleaved with the Schubert was 20th-century Hungarian music. Kurtag's Three Pieces for violin and piano Op 14e are evanescent scraps, each elusively nostalgic, with Kremer generating an extraordinary hollowed-out tone for the last of them. Bartok's Sonata for solo violin was another matter altogether. Kremer's performance was a revelation: not only an unflinching demonstration of the work's debt to Bach - especially in the chaconne-like rhythms of the opening movement, and the fugue - but also, in its rigour and passionate directness, it revealed itself as the greatest if least familiar of Bartok's late works.