It was never quite up there with “Dylan goes electric”, but any day that “Vika strings with gut” certainly thrills me with a greater frisson than Viktoria Mullova's more routine work with her Strad in the big halls with the big rep. And now even her Beethoven and Schubert are getting the gut-string treatment.

On paper this was the most sober set in Mullova's three-concert residency at the QEH, which also included jazz and gypsy music among its attractions. In fact, with her Strad left behind and her gut-stringed Guadagnini confronting Kristian Bezuidenhout's fortepiano, it turned into a fizzing evening of chamber music.

It wasn't without its frustrations. Mullova surely isn't used to partnering the softer fortepiano, for she needed to listen harder to Bezuidenhout's delicate passagework and intimate effects rather than wiping them out with her aggressive dynamics. And still sometimes missing from Mullova's arsenal is the ability simply to caress a phrase. In a pre-performance introduction we were asked to admire the violinist for her daring flight in 1983 from communist Russia. I couldn't help thinking afterwards that Mullova occasionally seems to play as if she's still on the run.

But what we certainly never heard tonight was Mullova the dispassionate or coolly disengaged. Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata came at us in a furious flurry of torment and turmoil, the (literally) guttural rasp of her playing never abrasive but always perfectly attuned to one of Beethoven's wildest yet most perfectly formed statements.

Perhaps even better, what might have been considered marginal repertory - an early Beethoven sonata in E flat, Op 12, Schubert's Rondo brilliante and Sonata in A - came off in terrific style in Mullova's wonderfully muscular and vigorous interpretations. It sounds like madness, but should she ditch that Strad for good?

The concert will be broadcast on October 28 on Radio 3

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