Mozart year is next year, but Anne-Sophie Mutter has already limbered up with a series of three recitals called Mutter's Mozart, which feature his sonatas for violin and piano. It was not a complete cycle - she dispensed with the juvenilia and began with the works Mozart composed at the age of 22 on a visit to Mannheim. These still show the violin regularly deferring to the piano as the dominant partner. One of the features of the series is the development of a more equal relationship.

Even from this starting point, not every work is a masterpiece. Mainly conceived for amateur players, the sonatas contain large tracts that are more decorative than substantial, even if Mozart's standards of decoration are a good deal higher than most. One of the most memorable works from this period is K304, the only example in a minor key; it was written in Paris in the wake of the sudden death of Mozart's mother. Mutter's adoption of a slender, nearly vibrato-less tone was an obvious yet effective strategy here.

Elsewhere in the second programme, she responded dutifully when the quality of the material was merely good as opposed to remarkable. Despite employing her characteristically warm and generous tone, Mutter sometimes sounded detached. But she rose with genuine expressiveness to the heights regularly reached in the slow movements and in the entirety of the more mature sonatas K454 and K481, the latter written around the time of Figaro.

The final recital brought forth two of the best of the bunch in the shape of the meaty K377, composed in 1781, and K526, dating from 1787, the year of Don Giovanni - arguably the most intricate and emotionally profound of the entire sequence. Mutter's playing was at its most engaged in the finest music, while her pianist, Lambert Orkis, demonstrated immaculate fingerwork and a strong sense of character throughout.