This year's Mainly Mozart festival by the Oxford Philomusica, in honour of the composer's 250th anniversary, has rightly had as its highlight Marios Papadopoulos's performances of the complete Mozart piano concertos. On a smaller scale, yet no less important, however, has been the Mozart violin and piano series featuring the great Japanese violinist Mayumi Fujikawa. I attended the last two of these, on November 25 and December 2, at the Jacqueline du Pr Music Building.

Mozart wrote sonatas for violin and piano from his earliest years through to 1787, four years before his death. As with the piano concertos, the Philomusica omitted the very earliest juvenilia, in this case the little sonatas written in London under the influence of the "London Bach", Johann Christian. These are, in any case, virtually short piano sonatas with violin accompaniment; later, as Mozart's travels took him to Paris, Mannheim, and finally Vienna, the sonatas grow from two to three movements, and the violin achieves equlity with the piano.

In the November concert, Mayumi Fujikawa took up this journey with K296 in C, one of the first to have a second, slow movement, even though it is virtually a transcription of one of J.C.Bach's arias. One noticed at once Mme Fujikawa's rich, intense tone (she plays a 1689 Guarnerius) and superbly expressive ornamentation. She also has the sense of humour which is intrinsic to Mozart; K403 was written in Vienna in the early days of his marriage, for himself as violinist and Constanze at the piano, and here one felt that the "old-style" three-part writing for his wife, labouring at the piano, perhaps serves her right for, as he put it, "listening to nothing but fugues".

Fujikawa was well accompanied in the first concert by a young recent Royal Acadamy of Music graduate, Oliver Markson, and superbly in the second by the American pianist Gerald Robbins. This was a notable concert, with Fujikawa sustaining the intensity through the brooding D minor variations of K377 and the regal Largo of K454 to the heart-rending Andante of K526, written in the year of Don Giovanni, in which the violin seems to catch the tragic vocal inflections of the opera's heroine Donna Anna.