We’ve had Beethoven’s complete music for cello and piano on period instruments before – notably from Pieter Wispelwey and Paul Komen/Lois Shapiro (Channel Classics) and Hidemi Suzuki and Yoshiko Kojima (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi) – but this one is a little different for using a piano built after Beethoven’s death. Jan Vermeulen sweeps away any suggestion that an 1830 instrument would by definition be inauthentic by declaring that Beethoven himself would have found the whole business of finding the ‘correct’ fortepiano for his music ‘an absurd non-issue’, and it’s hard not to feel that he could be right. Certainly the differences between the various kinds of early pianos that tend to get used for Beethoven are still less than that between any of them and a modern piano.

That is an important point, because there are few Classical combinations that benefit more from period-instrument treatment than these six sonatas (that number includes the composer-sanctioned cello version of the Horn Sonata, Op 17) and three variation sets, which are so difficult to balance satisfactorily until you go back to the older pianos with their lighter, more transparent sounds, and to cellos that are a little less heavy on the bass resonance. Jan Vermeulen’s piano by the Leipzig maker Johann Nepomuk Trödlin, however, offers more than just the clarity and brilliance of attack of slightly earlier pianos that can be so effective in moments such as the coda of Op 5 No 2 or the fugal conclusion of Op 102 No 2, and that can allow such quick responses to Beethoven’s ever-restless dynamic contrasts (as in the youthful vigour of the Op 5 Sonatas), for it also has a gentle bloom that adds just a touch of romantic warmth. I love the watery wash it gives to the tumbling trills near the beginning of Op 17. France Springuel’s cello has less of that resonance and, to be honest, less of an attractive sound overall, though it has a distinctive ardency in high-lying lyrical passages that seems to come from within, or at least from more than just having vibrato trowelled on.

Where these performances are less than successful to my ear is when a deeper and wiser involvement is needed, moments such as the Adagio of Op 102 No 2 (here lacking its sense of awed stillness) or the first movement of Op 69 (where a more floated grace would have been welcome). Occasionally momentum falters, too, especially in the variation sets. Interesting in places, then, but overall not a front-runner.