Sholto Kynoch is best known in Oxford for the Lieder Festival that he founded in the city seven years ago. But now he is switching his attention to his other great love – chamber music. Stand by for a major Beethoven fest, in which all ten of the composer’s violin sonatas will be performed over the next four months by some of this country’s most outstanding young musicians.

“I’ve wanted to play these pieces for a long time,” Sholto told me when we met to chat about his latest venture. “I’ve invited five different violinists, all people I work with regularly, and all of whom I rate very highly. I think it’s quite unusual and quite interesting to have a series where you get to hear all the works, you hear the scope of Beethoven’s output, and you also hear five different people’s approaches to that composer.

“Also, on the back of the Oxford Philomusica series, with all the symphonies and piano concertos, it seemed like good timing to do another Beethoven series, now people’s appetites have been whetted. So I hope it will appeal.”

The series begins at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building this weekend and stretches invitingly through to April 25, with a concert roughly every three weeks – a temptation indeed for chamber music aficionados.

For the first concert, Sholto will be joined by Jonathan Stone who, as a member of the prize-winning Doric String Quartet, will already be familiar to the Holywell coffee concert audiences. He will be followed on February 14 by the Singapore-born prodigy Tee Khoon Tang, who was playing the Paganini concerto by the age of 12, and at the age of 24 is already a Junior Fellow at the Guildhall School of Music.

The Albanian violinist Alda Dizdari, a former leader of the Allegri String Quartet, will be playing the famous ‘Kreutzer’ sonata on March 7; Japanese virtuoso Kaoru Yamada, a former fellow student of Sholto’s at the Royal Academy, follows on March 28; while Welsh violinist Cerys Jones, a recipient of many prestigious awards, brings the series to a close on April 25.

For Sholto, the sonatas present an irresistible challenge. “They’re difficult and they’re challenging, but they’re incredibly satisfying to play, particularly the early sonatas.

“The opus 12, the first three, you really have to work out what’s in them, because on the surface they’re quite simple and traditional in structure, so you have to find out how Beethoven is being innovative. So there’s a lot of searching to be done, and it’s very attractive to delve into that.”

How difficult is it, I wondered, to bring something new to pieces that have been played so many times before?

“As long as everybody approaches the music with an open mind and a genuine curiosity about what’s there and what it offers them, you can’t help but bring something new to it,” is Sholto’s opinion. “I try to avoid listening to recordings when I’m learning a piece. I like to have my own clear idea about it, and then maybe listen to some recordings, because it can bring interesting ideas forward. But if you look at the whole piece, and analyse every turn and every dynamic, inevitably nobody plays exactly the same because there are so many variables.”

Interspersed between the Beethoven sonatas will be the major sonatas by Bartók, which Sholto hopes will present an interesting contrast. “If you’re going to have two Beethoven sonatas in every programme you need something that’s a real contrast. Bartók is a different kind of challenge; it’s much more impressionistic, gypsy-based and just a very different aesthetic to anything Beethoven aims for. So it provides a nice foil, I hope; a bit more challenging but still quite attractive. I hope that will work well.”

Sholto’s ambitions include tackling all the Beethoven trios and cello sonatas, but in the meantime he is greatly looking forward to the forthcoming series. “I always love working with violinists, partly because there’s so much top-notch repertoire. There’s a really good blend – the immediacy of the violin matches the piano, particularly if you’ve got a really good violinist. It’s very much an equal partnership – I don’t feel like I’m the accompanist when I play these pieces. It’s always very exciting.”