Panocha Quartet/Andras Schiff, Wigmore Hall, London

Who but Leos Janacek would, or could have conceived a work so wilfully eccentric as his Concertino (1925) for piano and small ensemble? The first of its four movements, apparently inspired by seeing some boys goading a hedgehog, is for piano and horn alone. The second, simulating the chatter of a squirrel, is entirely for high clarinet and piano until the rest of the ensemble enters for the first time in its last five bars. The remaining movements, evoking night birds and whatnot, are as minimal in their material, abrupt in their continuity and bizarre in their textures as anything in his later music.

Incisively delivered by Andras Schiff and six of his regular chamber music accomplices as the opener to this final Wigmore Hall concert of his mini Janacek Festival, it did momentarily leave one wondering whether a whole evening of such fierce obsessiveness might prove a bit much. But not for long, since Schiff proceeded to unfold the Piano Sonata in E minor ("From the street 1.X.1905") with an exceptional amplitude; building an almost overwhelming fullness of tone without stridency in its second movement elegy for a young workman mown down by the police in a 1905 demonstration.

Then the Panocha Quartet came on to deliver that most enigmatic of Janacek's later chamber works, the String Quartet No I (1923) inspired by The Kreutzer Sonata of Tolstoy. Instead of the usual edgy volatility, we were treated to a reading of supple phrasing and the most complex, delicate half-shades – so that one longed to hear it a second time straight away. Instead it was the sonorous Schiff again in that wayward sequence In the Mist (1912) – though, in this instance, perhaps missing something of the music's intimacy.

Finally, there was the 70-year-old Janacek's affectionate memory of his insouciant youth Mladi (1924), in which he solved the problems of blending the five different instruments making up the standard wind quintet by bringing in an additional bass clarinet. Still sounding fresh after almost 80 years, it must have startled the small audience who somehow made it to the Wigmore Hall in 1926 at the height of the General Strike to hear its British premiere. Janacek, however, on his only visit to England, was not only taken with the sextet's young oboist – Leon Goossens – but enchanted by the whole thing.