If Melvyn Tan had been a guest at Berwickshire’s Paxton House in his younger days, he’d have arrived at the Borders Palladian mansion like one of those aristocratic drop-ins at Downtown Abbey. The clobber would have included his very own piano, a treasured facsimile of the type Beethoven might have owned, lighter in tone, smaller in stature and certainly not as explosive as a modern-day Steinway.

That was Tan in his early days, a pioneer of historically-informed piano performance, enlightening audiences with interpretations on the antecedent fortepiano, and hitting a milestone not only with his 1990s EMI recordings of Beethoven and Schubert, but his busy schedule of live concerts. Wherever he went, his precious instrument mostly followed.

Now in his sixties, the Singapore-born pianist has embraced a more practical stance. “Surprise, surprise, I’m using a modern piano at Paxton,” he chuckles, as we discuss his imminent mini-residency at this year’s Music at Paxton Festival, where over two days he performs a solo recital of Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas, a marathon duo concert with cellist Guy Johnston embracing all of Beethoven's cello sonatas, and conducts a public masterclass for amateur musicians.

“I’ve been taking the modern piano route for a while now,” Tan says. “It’s no longer practical for me to travel with my own instrument [a copy of an 18th century piano by Viennese manufacturer Nannette Streicher, one of Beethoven’s makers-of-choice]. The tuning suffers and the journey is cumbersome. It makes more sense these days to perform on a modern instrument, equipped nonetheless with the knowledge and experience I’ve amassed over the years.”

His career took off in the 1980s, having studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School before entering the Royal College of Music, where the requirement to learn a second instrument opened his eyes to the harpsichord, then to the Classical fortepiano.

“We were kind of pioneers,” he recalls. “People thought we were a bit crazy wanting to play these old instruments. But back then the early music movement had great characters like Roger Norrington, John Eliot Gardiner and Christopher Hogwood. We weren’t really sure what we wanted to do but it was that sense of discovery that made it so exciting – finding something new in old music.”

While it was important for him to have mastered Baroque and Classical music on on the instruments for which it was conceived, his creative thirst led to wacky programming that eschewed pigeonholing. Who could forget his dazzling appearance at the 2011 Edinburgh Festival, a challenging juxtaposition of sonatas by Scarlatti and the contemporary abstractions of John Cage? “It was [former Festival director] Jonathan Mills’ idea,” he recalls. “He persuaded me, and I discovered that Cage’s music suited me down to the ground – quite light, slightly Asian. Thank you, Jonathan!”

At Paxton the contrast is contained exclusively within Beethoven.

“Nos 1 and 2 of the cello sonatas are the most approachable, the young Beethoven showing off in the sort of Czerny mould: lots of articulation, lots of clarity. With the A major it becomes a bit more mature, all cantabile but with more complex voicing and textures. The final movements are just so ravishing, they make my heart go boom. Nos 4 and 5 are again in another category, with a hell of a difficult fugue in the fifth. Just what was he thinking?”

The same goes for the famously manic “boogie woogie before-its-time” moment in the final piano sonata. “How Beethoven imagined anyone could play that at the speed and power he indicated is beyond imagination,” Tan believes. “Why did he do it; how could the delicate instruments of the time have withstood that aggression?” Another reason, perhaps, to play safe with an indestructible Steinway.

Music at Paxton is at Paxton House, near Berwick-upon-Tweed, until 30 July. Melvyn Tan performs Beethoven on 25 July (with cellist Guy Johnston), and solo on 26 July, www.musicatpaxton.co.uk

Melvyn Tan on his celebration of Beethoven at Paxton House