No doubt there are many different ways of presenting all 10 of Beethoven’s violin sonatas in three recitals, all with their own logic. For their cycle at the Wigmore Hall, Julia Fischer and Igor Levit have opted for a straightforward, chronological sequence. That means that the best-known sonatas, the Spring and the Kreutzer, as well as the wonderfully solitary and enigmatic late sonata, the G major Op 96, fall in the later programmes, and the opening recital was dominated by the first set of three sonatas, Op 12.
There were suggestions in Fischer and Levit’s treatment of these sonatas from the 1790s that their performances might be better suited to the later works too. Technically and intellectually, both are outstanding musicians, but there were moments in the first two works of the Op 12 set, the sonatas in D and A, when their approach seemed just too rigorous and uncompromising, and something less severe, more conversational and personally nuanced might have been appropriate. The wit of both sonatas, their displaced accents and excursions into unexpected keys, was played down, while the sforzandos that launched the Rondo of Op 12 No 1 had an expressionist fierceness about them.
Everything fitted better in the third Op 12 work, with Levit especially relishing its flashy piano writing, and finally snapped into place in the A minor sonata Op 23, which Beethoven designed as a taut, tense contrast to the Spring Sonata Op 24 composed at the same time. Fischer and Levit do taut and tense very well; how they’ll cope with the Spring’s lyricism remains to be seen.
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At Wigmore Hall, London, on 5 and 6 July. Box office: 020-7935 2141.
