A Vancouver Recital Society presentation. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Sunday, March 15

Technically, this is criticism—but there’s precious little to criticize here.

Some might take issue with Steven Isserlis’s occasionally unconventional phrasing; at times he’ll cut a note short where it might ordinarily want to linger, or stress a beat that other cellists might elide. But always there’s a sense that his decisions are made for musical reasons—to set his listeners up for the next, more dramatic phrase, or to bring a more vocal inflection into a melodic line. He’s conscious of every possible choice, and picks what works best for him.

As for forte-piano specialist Robert Levin, in this second of two all-Beethoven concerts he was simply impeccable: neither unduly deferential to his more famous playing partner nor splashily assertive. Isserlis couldn’t hope for a better accompanist, which was obvious from the two musicians’ rapport.

This was great music played by masters. But this particular program was more than that: it was also a vivid lesson in how music can evolve in startling leaps, sometimes through human invention but also through technology. The earliest work on display was written in 1801; the latest was completed in 1817. But within that 16-year span, Ludwig van Beethoven graduated from a musical master mechanic to a true visionary; ironically, his sonic options widened as his deafness grew.

For the first half of the program, Levin performed on a reproduction of an early Viennese forte-piano, circa 1780, an instrument that displayed its harpsichord heritage in both looks and sound. It proved an ideal choice for Beethoven’s seven variations on a theme from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute: decorous and polite, it danced demurely behind Isserlis’s cello like a line of courtiers. But when Levin switched to a genuine 1847 Broadwood instrument—still a forte-piano, but far closer in looks and sound to a modern concert grand—the concert took flight.

It was easy to recognize how Beethoven’s music evolved with the instruments available to him. An additional octave’s range gave him access to thunderous chords in the bass, but more than that the extra volume of the later forte-pianos allowed him to treat keyboard and cello as equals. In the simultaneously written Cello Sonata in C Major and Cello Sonata in D Major the melodies are both more complex and more complexly intertwined, culminating in the latter work’s third movement, a fugue that almost rivals that of Beethoven’s String Quartet in B-flat Major.

In Isserlis and Levin’s hands, time stopped as this gorgeous music went on.

Paradoxically, though, their concert also argued that something can be lost through technological innovation, and this was most notable in the third movement of the C-major sonata. Here, Isserlis’s tone blossomed to especially luxuriant proportions, largely thanks to the gut strings that he prefers to the more recent metal-wound variety.

His choice was both historically correct and musically appropriate, although thousands of sheep might disagree.