Last year, cellist Alban Gerhardt appeared at the Wigmore Hall as part of a piano trio with Alina Ibragimova and Steven Osborne. It was the first time the three had played chamber music together; in the two great Schubert trios, there was something slightly provisional about the results. Here, too, Gerhardt was breaking in a new partnership – his first recital with Thomas Larcher, who nowadays is much better known in Britain at least as a composer than as an pianist.

Gerhardt has few peers among today's cellists, and his astonishing range of colour and articulation, combined with a searching musical intelligence and the phenomenal ability to play this whole programme, including its world premiere, from memory makes him very special. On this showing, though, Larcher seems a much more straightforward, matter-of-fact player, who accompanies very faithfully, but hardly brings much imagination or variety to his own contributions.

So, in two of Schumann's cello and piano works and Debussy's Cello Sonata, it was Gerhardt who came up with all the ideas: blunt humour and bittersweet expressiveness in Schumann's Five Pieces in Popular Style Op 102; lightning volte faces and elusive fantasy in the Debussy. In Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata, the partnership seemed more equitable, though it was still the range of Gerhardt's imagination that compelled attention, making the simplest musical ideas into something genuinely memorable.

There was a new work from Larcher, too – Splinters, commissioned specially for this recital. The three movements came with the usual Larcher bag of tricks: the piano was first carefully prepared with piano tuners' rubber mutes to create some undeniably striking sounds, and then removed to restore the full dynamic range for the final movement, while the cello part ranges between swooping glissandos and rapid figuration. It's all musically negligible, but Gerhardt made it seem almost worthwhile.