If you still think there are no historic female composers worth exploring, just take a look at Pauline Viardot. The multitalented mezzo-soprano (1821-1910) bestrode the opera world of her day and left a treasure chest of excellent original music, including around 200 songs. During her long life she was friend and inspiration to a plethora of composers, among them Chopin, Berlioz, Bizet, Brahms and Fauré, whose mother-in-law she nearly became. George Sand based a novel on her, and the writings of her (probable) lover, Ivan Turgenev, are shot through with his obsessive passion for her. The poet Alfred de Musset said that her voice resembled “the timbre of a wild fruit”. And her salon gatherings were the stuff of legend.

For her first Wigmore Hall solo recital, last Monday’s lunchtime concert, the young French soprano Sabine Devieilhe evoked Viardot’s salon in a programme of varied enchantments. Far from wild or fruity, Devieilhe is the proud possessor of a high, finely nuanced tone that she wields with intelligence, sophistication and charisma. She has many hallmarks of a rising star: a cut-diamond precision to her uppermost register, a rose-gold sheen to the middle, and no loss of character in the lower range – for instance, as Berlioz’s wordless refrain in La mort d’Ophélie floats downstream to a watery grave.

Devieilhe and her splendid pianist, Anne Le Bozec, admittedly sounded most comfortable in French repertoire. The German pieces, including Clara Schumann’s Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen and two of her husband Robert’s best-loved numbers, Widmung and Der Nussbaum, didn’t have quite the same suppleness and spaciousness granted to Viardot’s gorgeous lament Hai luli, or Fauré’s suave meditation Au bord de l’eau. But coloratura fireworks fizzed and sparkled in Viardot’s adaptation of a Chopin mazurka; and in the encore, Debussy’s Apparition, Devieilhe and Le Bozec unleashed a glory of sensual, radiant-voiced luxuriance, adding new significance to the term “auspicious debut”. It would have been nice to hear more of Viardot’s own songs – but to perform everything that deserved inclusion would have taken all day. Not that I’d have minded. The concert was live on Radio 3 and you can hear it on iPlayer.

If the theme of obsessive love was never far away in that programme, obsessions of another kind underpinned a remarkable evening on Tuesday, when the City of London Sinfonia presented an orchestral lecture-recital with a difference under the title Hero Worship. It focused on the transformation of Beethoven’s style after he began to lose his hearing. And if the composer started by hero-worshipping Napoleon – which did not last long – he ended up transformed into a veritable hero himself. On stage with the orchestra was Christopher Clark, regius professor of history at Cambridge University, and the Australian composer, conductor and violist Brett Dean. The Queen Elizabeth Hall’s spanking new interior, with wood and leather still smelling like a quality shoe shop, proved its worth as its clear, warm acoustic let music and words shine.

First, Clark gave us a whistle-stop tour of early Beethoven, with bleeding chunks of the Septet, Piano Concerto No 1 and the first two symphonies. But then Beethoven’s world was torn apart as he faced up to his deafness. The composer’s handwriting in his Heiligenstadt testament, documenting this crisis, shone down from the screen, and Dean’s Testament (2008) provided a musical response, as well as some intense empathy.

Dean is a compositional hot property, especially after the roaring success of his Hamlet at Glyndebourne last year, and this work shares some of the startling originality of the opera’s soundscapes, as well as being constructed with admirable clarity. It leads us towards some notion of how Beethoven himself might have heard the world. The violins often use bows untreated with the rosin that normally makes them grip the string, the result hinting at sound rather than projecting it: high, sustained flutes are surrounded by barely audible stutterings and skitterings. Clark showed, with a chart, that Beethoven’s deafness had its upside: without audible distraction, he could better focus on his inner imagination. Thus Dean’s work progresses through fragments of a Beethoven “Razumovsky” quartet into resurgent determination.

And so to the Symphony No 3, the “Eroica” – originally dedicated to Napoleon, but altered, when Bonaparte declared himself emperor, to “the memory of a great man”. (But who exactly? The mystery remains.) A magnetising figure positively oozing music, Dean conducted while playing principal viola, and the City of London Sinfonia proved putty in his sizable hands. Being a fine composer doesn’t guarantee accomplishment as conductor – I’ve heard some horrors – but Dean is a case apart. He conjured the Eroica with a creator’s fresh ear for its iconoclasm and a natural communicator’s instinct for breath, focus and direction. Orchestral musicians who could stand up to play did so, the double basses came in from the cold alongside the violas, and strong inner voices sprang to life, unfurling the symphony as a gigantic piece of chamber music.

Did the format, with lecture, contemporary work and standing players, make us appreciate Beethoven’s Third Symphony anew? One way or another, the experience was wonderfully invigorating.

Star ratings (out of 5)
Sabine Devieilhe & Anne Le Bozec ★★★★
City of London Sinfonia ★★★★