There’s something about ‘complete cycle’ recording projects that always feels particularly special. The act of complete absorption in one specific and entire chunk of a composer’s oeuvre; what that means in terms of an artist’s relationship with that composer; and also what it says about the artist in question, in relation to his or her own musical maturity.

The degrees of all the above will then usually vary depending on the artist and project in question. However, it must be said that with Chloë Hanslip and Danny Driver’s complete Beethoven cycle of Sonatas for Violin and Piano, recorded live for Rubicon over three recitals at Southampton’s Turner Sims Hall, there’s an overwhelming sense of all of those elements coming strongly into play.

Firstly in terms of age milestones, because the project neatly coincides both with Hanslip’s 30th birthday and with Driver’s 40th. Furthermore, whilst 30 is still relatively young in career terms for many solo artists, Hanslip has in fact been on the professional performance circuit for almost 20 years, thanks to a prodigious talent that saw her, in 2001 aged just 13, become the youngest ever artist to sign with Warner Classics.

Another significant factor regarding Hanslip is that it’s actually been a fair old while since she’s recorded such core repertoire. While her first two releases with the London Symphony Orchestra on Warner presented well-known crowd-pleasers (the 2001 recording comprised popular shorts such as Shostakovich’s The Gadfly, and the 2002 disc featured Bruch’s Violin Concertos Nos 1 and 3), her subsequent projects have moved in a different direction. For Naxos and then Hyperion, Hanslip has embraced far more specialist repertoire: Benjamin Godard, Antonio Bazzini, Jenö Hubay, York Bowen and Nikolai Medtner have been just some of the composers explored in recent years.

So, all in all, this new Beethoven project feels somewhat momentous, yet when I sit down with Hanslip and Driver to ask how it came about, they’re remarkably matter-of-fact about the entire thing.

‘I think it came quite naturally, didn’t it?’ says Hanslip cheerily, glancing towards Driver as she does so for assent (and indeed the two turn out to be just as much of an interview duo as an onstage one, bouncing off each other’s comments and watching for each other’s reactions). ‘We’d been doing the Beethoven sonatas in recital programmes, and people kept on asking if we had plans to record them. Then we went to play at the Turner Sims, and its Concert Manager Kevin Appleby asked us what we wanted to perform there next. So with the music already in our programme it grew from there.’

‘Yes,’ says Driver, taking up the thread, ‘and the idea of recording them then followed because the Turner Sims is a good venue to record in; very intimate, a good sound, and the piano is lovely. So it just seemed as though all arrows converged.’ He then adds: ‘There’s no sense that anything is definitive though. If we were to record it again in 20 years’ time or even next week it would be totally different, because that’s the richness of the text and its possibilities. So inasmuch as it’s always going to be a snapshot, why not? It’s a great opportunity.’

As for the contents of this particular ‘snapshot’, my impression upon attending the first of their three recitals was of a light, energetic, period-aware performance, made all the more enjoyable for the way in which Hanslip and Driver were clearly sparking off each other as they went. Also noteworthy was Hanslip’s lack of fear at digging into her instrument at times to find a more aggressive sound – an approach she confirms as we chat. ‘It’s not always about making the most beautiful sound, I find,’ she muses. ‘Some of the writing is quite violent – some of the sforzandos and the accents – so I’m trying to bring that out. Equally, when the music requires a slightly more grounded sound, I’m trying to find that.’ She continues: ‘I was also deliberately trying not to put any of my own imprint on it. Instead, it was just hours and hours of trying to study exactly what was in the score, and making sure that I was following the markings and the phrasings that Beethoven writes, in a way that makes sense. For instance sometimes he writes a long legato line which looks almost impossible to do, but that’s the phrasing that he wanted.’

Driver then interjects: ‘There’s also something in this project about the way Beethoven is commonly perceived by a general audience, which is based mostly around either heroic or epic works, or slightly mystic or philosophical late works, whereas these violin sonatas are earlier. Most of them were written between 1798 and 1803, and as such they speak of a very different kind of Beethoven. There’s a little humour, a lot of charm, a lot of Beethoven the aspiring young composer wanting to impress his superiors: the dedication to Salieri in the first three, and the alarmingly virtuosic “Look at what I can do” piano writing. So I think what makes our approach individual is just that we’re finding a very honest response to the music, going back to the text of the time as much as possible, and at the same time being very alive in today’s time. I’d say it’s partly scholarly and partly intuitive.’

Driver’s thoughts have also been encompassing how to translate the works into the sound world and capabilities of his modern Steinway. ‘With Beethoven there are so many markings that are so specifically geared to the instruments of the time, that they need to be completely reconsidered when you’re playing a modern piano,’ he says. ‘Even things like forte versus piano, because the dynamic range Beethoven was thinking of was much narrower. So although the contrasts are on the one hand very palpable, they’re much less to do with the dynamic level itself than with character possibilities or dialogue. Similarly, as you go up the scale on a piano of that period, the sound just disappears, meaning that when Beethoven marks a huge crescendo on a line travelling upwards to the top of the keyboard, it was probably still heard as more of a diminuendo. You hear so many people just getting louder and louder as they go up, when it’s more to do with the importance of sustaining a line, or just keeping the tension of your musical statement.’

In other words, while Driver and Hanslip embarked on this Beethoven cycle in a very natural, relaxed manner, their relationship with the music is exceptionally profound, as Hanslip confirms when I mention the auspicious timing with their significant birthdays. ‘It’s nice that it’s come together with me turning 30’, she owns, ‘but it’s something deeper. Whenever I play the Beethoven Concerto it just feels, I don’t know, so big and so incredible that it’s very hard to put it into words. I absolutely adore it, but with the sonatas I adore having the opportunity to study everything, to be able to really have conversations onstage to an even greater extent than with the concerto, and it just felt like now was a good time to do them. I’m sure that I’ll want to do them again, though, and that in 20 years’ time it will also feel like a good time.’

Hanslip’s ‘big 3-0’ does feel significant to onlookers though. Including myself, because my own first sight of her was all the way back in 2001, when she was kneeling on the floor of a BBC radio studio as she lifted her violin from its case for an interview about the Warner signing. This is a memory that has lingered because, even while wondering whether this 13-year-old would last the distance or simply be a child-prodigy-shaped flash in the pan, I’d been struck by her calm composure and the maturity of her playing. Likewise her appearance two years previously as a child-prodigy violinist in Martha Fiennes’s 1999 film adaptation of Onegin, because she’d similarly come across not as a child performer simply trotting out what she’d been taught by rote, but as a young musician passionately absorbed in what she was doing.

But how, I ask her now, has it felt from her perspective? ‘It’s been extraordinary,’ she enthuses. ‘To have the experience of standing in front of the LSO in their studios when you’re 13, and the same with the Bruch when I was 14, was mind-boggling. I’ve had so many wonderful experiences. I’ve studied abroad. I’ve played chamber music with so many wonderful musicians. I just feel like I’ve had an incredibly rich time.’

And what about the ‘child prodigy’ label, I ask. Is that something she identifies with, or has it been something she’s consciously had to transition away from?

‘I have to say that I never thought of myself as a prodigy or a wunderkind or anything like that,’ she comments. ‘I was doing what I loved. My parents often said to me, “If you want to give up tomorrow that’s fine, we don’t mind”, so it was very much led by me. I certainly never thought of myself as having to transition from being a child prodigy into an adult performer either, although there were times when I wasn’t necessarily doing as many concerts or recordings but was instead just focusing. But I just think it all happened quite organically. Or at least I hope it did!’

It was a complete York Bowen cycle of works for violin and piano on Hyperion that first brought Hanslip and Driver together six years ago, and Driver is eloquent as to why they work so well as a duo despite their 10-year age gap. ‘When I first met Chloë she was in her earlier twenties and I was in my earlier thirties,’ he says. ‘However, I couldn’t by any stretch say that I’d had more experience than her, because whereas I’d come to performing having first done a science degree, she’d been doing the international touring circuit since she was about 12.’ He continues: ‘We also bring different approaches. Being a scientist by training means that I tend to analyse things a lot. Chloë meanwhile is more instinctive. So I hope I’ve become more instinctive over the years as a result’, to which Hanslip responds, ‘Whereas I would say I have become more analytical!’

So what do they want listeners to hear in their Beethoven? ‘I hope that they will hear dialogue and vibrancy,’ Hanslip says. ‘And also that they just hear Beethoven and what he wrote.’

Hanslip and Driver will be performing Beethoven's Violin Sonatas Nos 9 and 10 at Turner Sims Concert Hall on October 17. For further information, please visit: turnersims.co.uk

This article originally appeared in the October 2017 issue of Gramophone. To find out more about subscribing, visit: magsubscriptions.com