From the moment Zolt?n and Peter Katona walked on stage it was clear that interaction between them is an important part of the musical experience of watching and hearing the twins perform.

They make the music live and breathe by dividing it into emotional and thematic blocs which they often punctuate by an exchange of glances. Their arrangement of the music reinforces this interaction. The effect is unique.

So when they perform as soloists it takes a moment for the audience to adjust. The solo pieces they played were flamenco ones by the Spanish flamenco artist Sabicas (Agustin Campos).

Flamenco is a new departure for the twins, who explained that it helped inform their understanding of classical Spanish music because so many composers draw on its folk/gypsy/Arab tradition.

Techniques of flamenco are also radically different from classical guitar playing. The twins have certainly mastered these.

The music is a blazing torrent, swirling round little pavane like structures. And that?s why they did it solo. It?s impossible to imagine as duet.

The programme was evenly divided between baroque and Spanish music with wonderful examples of both.

The twin?s fort? is baroque keyboard music; Bach?s French suite No 5 with it?s mixture of wistfulness and then it?s huge, driving gigue at the end and Scarlatti?s Sonatas K481 and K141, the latter sounding like guitar music with its tremolo passages.

These works were interpreted using enhanced contrast, another characteristic of the Katona?s playing. Soft, loud, sweet, strident are enhanced with their playing because of increased contrast; if one plays ?softly? at 50 percent of the volume of ?loud?, then with the Katonas the same percentage would be, say, 20 percent.

This has the effect of drawing in the audience more, and enabling the guitar to be at it?s most intimate and sweet.

The twins played a musical rarity which piqued my interest, this being a sonata in four movements by S.L. Weiss for two lutes.

Actually, while this was a very pleasing piece, beautifully executed, it didn?t sound much like Weiss but more like Lauffensteiner except in the slow movement, the Largo, which was very close in spirit to Weiss? Tombeau de M Logy with its daring and unexpected shifts in chord structures.

The Spanish part of the programme consisted of Rodrigo?s 1931 work Serenata Espa?ola, a work redolent of looming civil war in Spain, with its harsh, insistent and militaristic booming march sounds contrasting with brief glimpses of idyllic peacefulness, Alb?niz? beautiful and evocative Mallorca and finished with de Falla?s early masterpiece, El amor brujo.

Composed in 1915, the work is a series of vignettes, some lyrical and tender, some strange and scary, finishing with Danza Rituel del Fuego.

No ritual except one of slaughter or self immolation could be built round this thrashing, maenadic monster of a dance, powered by magic of incomprehensible and malevolent purpose and power. In this piece de Falla describes the 20th century holocausts, wars and political terrors.