When composers get the chance to programme their own works alongside music they particularly admire, the results are always revealing. The concert that Judith Weir devised for the Schubert Ensemble, the latest in the group's series of composer portraits, was no exception: there was one substantial piece of Weir, her Piano Trio Two, from 2004, and three of her smaller pieces, all string duos of various kinds, together with a piano quartet by David Knotts and Fauré's First Piano Quintet.

The parallels between the studied understatement in Fauré's later chamber works and in Weir's even more laconic music were nicely drawn. Though Weir's musical antecedents generally seem to come from farther east in Europe, there is something of the French composer's harmonic ambiguity and intuitive sense of formal architecture in her background, too. Anyone who has heard one of her operas will remember how the simplest melodic shape can take on huge expressive responsibility, and in Piano Trio Two, the ghosts of different folk musics flit through textures that are illuminated from all kinds of unexpected angles, revealing landscapes that are compellingly strange.

The three duos showed how such sharply focused music creates potent miniatures. Two were written specially for this concert: St Agnes, for viola and cello, is a rather wistful blues, while What Sound Will Chase Elephants Away? puts a pair of double basses through their lumbering paces, with snatches of boogie-woogie, percussive sounds and woozy harmonics.

Alongside those, Knotts' 10-minute Kitharodia seemed positively prolix. Inspired by the Homeric character Thamyris, a singer who accompanied himself on a five-string harp, it casts the piano as the harp while the strings deliver the increasingly impassioned and convoluted song. It's impressively effective.