Lunchtime concerts more than safe in the hands of stand-in Ashley Wass

Small in duration but rich in concentrated musical nourishment, the BBC lunchtime concerts are a wonderful institution. Recently, they’ve added rush-hour concerts at 6.30pm, similarly short and sharp. Yesterday, they offered both.

The starriest of the two performers was young German violinist Veronika Eberle. She’s been praised by Simon Rattle, no less, and is particularly strong in older classical music, where her sweetly delicate tone and feeling for the “speaking” rhetoric of Baroque music are naturally at home.

Her rush-hour concert was filled with exactly the repertoire that should have shown her off to best advantage. We had the so-called “Guardian Angel” Passacaglia of Heinrich Biber and the well-known Chaconne in D minor by Bach (a bold move, to play these immense pieces back to back), plus sonatas for violin and harpsichord, in which Eberle was joined by Jonathan Cohen. Right from the off, it was unimpeachably stylish, with the rhetorical pauses in Locatelli’s extravagantly decorative sonata nicely highlighted. But the effect seemed somehow studied.

Conventions only come to life when you can feel performers pushing against their limits, and Eberle always remained safely within them. When she did push against them, as in those moments in Bach’s Chaconne where she forced the tone, it felt too cautious to be convincing.

How much more genuinely eloquent was the lunchtime concert from pianist Ashley Wass, who was standing in at short notice for the indisposed Ingrid Fliter. In his hands, Robert Schumann’s hackneyed Scenes from Childhood took on an unusual meditative tenderness, as if the feelings of the kindly bourgeois parents were centre stage. To achieve that, virtuosity had to be deliberately excluded. In Smetana’s Macbeth and the Witches and Prokofiev’s arrangements of numbers from his ballet Romeo and Juliet, virtuosity came roaring back.

Mercutio’s Dance had a dangerously exciting edge, proving that one pair of hands can be more eloquent than many – if they’re the right hands.