I found much to admire in the first instalment of Antje Weithaas and Dénes Várjon’s survey of the Beethoven violin sonatas (7/23), although I felt their softer playing could have been more confidential. I’ve no such quibbles with this second volume. Listen, say, to Várjon’s arresting sotto voce at the beginning of the C minor Sonata, Op 30 No 3 – and note, too, the way he ostensibly puts fermatas over the rests, extending the silences in order to ratchet up the drama. I also love how soft and sustained their playing is at 2'12", an extraordinary passage whose harmonic shifts seem to presage Schubert at his most lyrically eloquent and visionary. Then, in the warmth of the Adagio cantabile, listen to how Weithaas makes the most of the weird, wild birdcalls (at 4'40").

Indeed, it’s the duo’s ability to characterise so imaginatively that makes these interpretations especially satisfying. I’ve never heard the trills in the first movement of the G major Sonata, Op 30 No 2, sound as insidious as they do here, for instance – try at the beginning of the development section (from 3'55"). And they’re unusually free with the tempo of the second-movement Tempo di minuetto, injecting an element of fantasy into this otherwise galant music. Similarly, although they play the opening Allegro con spirito of Op 12 No 3 with unfailing elegance (and a steady tempo), there’s something distinctly rhapsodic in the way they handle the music’s various virtuosic roulades.

Rest assured that no attempt is made to prettify these works – those giant fortissimo chords in the first movement of the C minor Sonata have an appropriate crunch, for example – although what stands out most for me on this disc is the unstudied refinement of their playing as well as their appreciation of the music’s subtleties. How joyful and light on its feet their reading of the finale of the G major Sonata is, say, even in the coda, where the harmonic and motivic high jinks are handled with taste as well as wit. If the subsequent volumes are as polished and freshly insightful as this, Weithaas and Várjon’s cycle will be one to reckon with.