Few other world-class musicians bring so much interest and engagement to their performances as clarinettist Emma Johnson.

These virtues enhance rather than overshadow her astounding musicianship, even in pieces of minor or even negligible worth.

Such was the impression on this return visit to Newport, where with pianist John Lenehan she recreated the 19th-century virtuoso recital in which a couple of sturdy growths stand superior in a garden of lesser blooms.

The choice of music involved her in some fierce blowing, the clarinet uncommonly assertive, and then in moments of tenderness as the instrument confirmed itself as the receptacle of her moods.

This transference of personality to the music is one of her finest qualities, resulting here in imperial but infinitely varied accounts of the Brahms F minor sonata of his Opus 120 and the teenage Mendelssohn’s sonata in E flat.

With phrase-making of sinuous and supple shape, statements of uninhibited boldness and reflective moments almost heart-wrenching in their compassion, she made of these works a sufficiency.

Yet, true to intent, what followed was of less moving substance in which the clarinet, released from its more onerous duties, let fly – nowhere more so than in Luigi Bassi’s florid arrangement of tunes from Verdi’s Rigoletto and, more deadpan, in Widor’s Introduction and Rondo.

The second of Schumann’s Op 94 Romances, Edward German’s Romance and two extracts from Paul Reade’s The Victorian Kitchen Garden, settled us nicely – in a deckchair, the bees humming and everything right with the world.