As virtuoso cellist and inspired chamber musician, Steven Isserlis has juggled a double career with magicianly skill. His Wigmore Hall evenings with friends guarantee intimate music-making on the highest level, usually with unexpected repertoire about which he feels passionate.

This was so last night, the first of four Russian concerts, in which he was joined by the Jerusalem Quartet as well as violinist Baiba Skride, clarinettist Martin Fröst and Kirill Gerstein, piano. It’s hard to imagine a musician looking happier than Isserlis does on these occasions, when his playing has yet greater than usual freedom and, even in darker moments, a sense of smiling rhapsody.

First he was joined by Gerstein and Fröst for Glinka’s short Trio pathetique (1832), a tender, melancholy work with echoes of Schubert and Beethoven. Then the Jerusalem Quartet showed how much better Borodin’s String Quartet No 2 in D fares when sentiment gives way to muscularity and lucidity. The wistful Kismet slow movement (used for “And this is my beloved”) was blissfully free of eastern promise. The novelty was the Piano Quintet No 2 in G minor Op 30 by Sergei Taneyev — a pivotal figure in Russian music, as pianist, teacher and composer. This dashing aristocratic figure, expert in Esperanto and a frequent object of female infatuation, wrote a substantial quantity of music, now virtually ignored in the West.

On the evidence of this quintet, with its big-boned and thickly scored opening movement and all sorts of curious colours and techniques thereafter, Taneyev is better at gesture and episode than at sustained musical thought. But it had the best possible ambassadors and to have encountered the music of Rachmaninov’s teacher had its own enigmatic fascination.

Series continues tomorrow with Joshua Bell, 7.30pm