Rachel Podger/Christopher Glynn, King's Place, review: Beethoven from the other end of the telescope

It was fitting that Beethoven should have been the focus of one of the very last concerts before the lockdown. In what may turn out to have been the final live performance of his music in London during his 250th anniversary year, the composer's all too often overlooked Violin Sonata No. 1 in D became a destination rather than a starting point, thanks to this intelligently programmed "Finding Beethoven" concert by the violinist Rachel Podger and pianist Christopher Glynn at Kings Place.

It's refreshing to find Beethoven viewed from this other end of the telescope — not showing his long shadow across the 19th century and into modern music, but rather looking at him in the context of his musical forebears. Playing on a period piano and violin with gut strings and historical bows, the duo opened with Mozart's Violin Sonata in C, K303, one of those works that grew out of the tradition of keyboard sonatas with violin accompaniment but shifted the balance towards a more equal partnership.

But as with their next piece of Mozart, his Fantasia in C minor, K396, the performance was a little too polite. This Fantasia inhabits a different Mozartian world, dark and restless, yet the main interest was that we were actually hearing a world premiere: the Fantasia was left by Mozart as a violin-piano fragment of 27 bars and completed posthumously for solo keyboard work Maximilian Stadler. Now the Royal Academy of Music's Timothy Jones has returned it to the violin and piano, where it sits with Mozartian naturalness.

The most moving Mozart heard here was a Lockdown Eve encore: the Menuetto from his Sonata in E minor, K 304, could hardly have sounded more wistful. Podger and Glynn were also very much at home with their lively performance of CPE Bach's Violin Sonata in D minor, where the contrapuntal spirit of his father JS Bach may hover but in which the younger composer is onto something fresh and new.

Beethoven's early sonata was prefaced by even earlier Beethoven, and the Six German Dances (WoO 42) sounded very pleasing, with the folksiness of the first evoked by the violin dragging like a bagpipe drone. The performers showed that while the Sonata No. 1 may frequently be overlooked in favour of Beethoven's more celebrated essays in the form, the composer was already a great innovator. Podger and Glynn dug into the work, bringing depth of feeling to the second movement's variations and boisterous high spirits to the finale.

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THREE STARS

John Allison

The Kings Place season continues with online streamings: kingsplace.co.uk