Yo-Yo Ma / Kathryn Stott, Barbican Hall, London

You expect Yo-Yo Ma to come up with surprises. Advertising a straight recital of four familiar pieces with piano counts as one of them, and not uttering a word to the audience all evening as another. And what at first appeared to be a conventional programme turned out to be nothing of the kind, since most of it featured him lending his cello to music from the French repertoire for violin.

There are two good cello sonatas by Gabriel Fauré, so taking over one written for the violin isn't necessary to fill a gap. It's all a matter of imagination. If cellists can apply their inner ear to several chunks near the beginning of Fauré's No 1, and the whole of the slow movement, they will hear music that they would die to play. And these passages sound so good, and show off the instrument's middle and upper register so well, that you understand why. Like the movements Fauré did intend for the cello, their lyrical ardour and energy make you long to be a cellist.

At least, they do if you hear the higher passages played with Ma's uncommonly fine tuning and beauty of tone. In general, he found a nicely idiomatic mix of pace, passion and lightness, and a brilliantly close, sparky ensemble with the pianist Kathryn Stott. The only problem area was the scherzo, too fast and tricky for even Ma to be totally accurate, and inevitably ponderous beside what a violin can do. Apart from this heroic losing struggle, the sonata was a real, different musical experience with a bigger range than the original instrument.

Unlike the Fauré, Cèsar Franck's violin sonata has always been played by cellists. Curiously, it doesn't transfer so well, as the music tends to growl low down, the big melodies lose some of their ecstatic singing quality, and the busier textures make the piano get in the cello's way more often, where a violin's tone cuts through. It was a good move on Ma's part to play the opening, and the famous canon theme in the finale, with an unruffled serenity that brought the best out of his instrument. This was a focused, intense performance with a sensitive response to the struggles and ever-evolving moods of the middle movements.

Starting each half of the recital with real cello music, Ma was less at ease with Debussy's Cello Sonata, a stop-go performance that suited the quirky middle movement but pushed the rest too hard for its delicate balance between pace and reflectiveness. It was a great virtuoso team effort, but not always the best for the music. The cello movement from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time was superb, delivered as though in one vast, slow phrase, like the opening of an Indian raga elaboration.

The violin music wasn't over, though, as Ma encored with some Massenet. The "Meditation" from his opera Thais made a revealing transfer as its fine balance between erotic and perfumed-Catholic tipped towards the former. After this, piano Gershwin and orchestral Elgar. Why not? Ma is so good a musician that he always has something extra to give to his choices.