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Remember the poem by Jenny Joseph, warning that when she is old, “I shall wear purple / With a red hat which doesn’t go”? There was a hint of the same gentle anarchy in this remarkable performance by Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich and her Korean sometime mentee Dong Hyek Lim.

The advertised first half of piano duets including Schubert’s Fantasia in F minor D940 was scrapped in favour of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major K448 and Ravel’s two-piano arrangement of La Valse – only for the Schubert Fantasia to reappear in the second half as a monumental, 20-minute encore following Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances in its two-piano original version. Between works, the two pianists meandered around the stage, chatting and occasionally bowing – Argerich leaning on Lim’s arm but driving nonetheless. There were onstage negotiations about whether or not to swap pianos after the first work. There were furious looks shot at page-turners caught on the back foot. Every movement started before the audience had settled.

From the musician “generally recognised as the greatest pianist alive today”, such audience-be-damned bumbling had its own charm. Almost 70 years since her first major competition wins, Argerich will turn 85 in June. At 41, Lim is less than half her age. Where he generally favoured the pianistic primary colours of bright attack, she conjured 50 shades of grey: distant cosmic rumbling at the bottom of the texture in the Schubert; veiled, suspended-animation pianissimo in portions of the Rachmaninov; silvery, crystalline descants in the Mozart.

But there were also moments of astonishing pianistic ventriloquism. The second movement of the Mozart saw the two match tone, gleam for gleam, with Lim imitating Argerich’s gossamer touch in a breathtaking sotto voce passage. Where the Mozart was pure limpid elegance, the Ravel was deliciously muddy, with the work’s intoxicating pulse gradually rising from the depths as the two pianists exchanged bass detonations. Towards the end Argerich pushed forwards, ever-faster – her hands barely skimming the keyboard – as Lim scrambled to keep up, the waltz teetering on the brink of catastrophe in a high-wire act that couldn’t have been more thrilling.