The 25 years old Viennese cellist walked onto the stage of Petaling Jaya's Civic so casually attired that the audience must have concluded that someone had run off with her concert gown just before the performance was due to begin, and she had no choice but to come in her street clothes.

And to make matters worse, she had to share the stage that evening with bassoonist Werner Schulze who was sartorially resplendent, as professional musicians ought to be.

However, clothes do not make a musician. Zimmerman quickly drew attention away from her dress to the way she played her cello by giving a sterling performance throughout the evening, often leaving Schulze, a widely performed musician and composer, well behind in the musical stakes.

Zimmerman, who has studied with Valentin Erben, a cellist with the renowned Alban Berg String quartet, displayed deft virtuosity in handling the most difficult of bowing passages with swift runs up and down her finger board.

Her virtuosity was especially evident in a sonata for cello and piano (the piano part being played on the bassoon) by Bocherinni (1743 - 1805) which closed the first half of the programme which had also presented pieces by Barriere (1705 - 1747) and Hindemith (1895 - 1963).

After the interval, Zimmerman and Schulze returned to interpret a Mozart sonata arranged for cello and bassoon, a pairing which did not sound convincing because the two instruments are so disparate in tone and timbre.

They next played a composition written this year by Schulze which used the themes of three Malaysian / Indonesian folk songs. Schulze has so thoroughly assimilated these pieces into his compositional style that, if it were not for the programme notes, no one would have been any the wiser of the origins of this work.

And it was a pity that Schulze, 38, a professor at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, did not attempt to explain t o his audience the genesis of his composition, or anything else about his interest in the music of the East, nor even about the bassoon (a rarity in these parts of the world) to his audience which comprised mainly music students.

Finally, Zimmerman and Schulze concluded their short concert with two pieces by Bizet (1838 - 1875) and Honegger (1892 - 1955) which they played for no good reason without a pause, a coupling most people would regard as strange to say the least.

This concert was presented by the Selangor Institute of Music in association with the Austrian Embassy and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.