Pianist Miki Skuta’s innate musicality and feeling for nuance attracted me to his superb 2004 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. These assets also inform his less consistent Beethoven release. For the most part his tempo choices for Op 111’s Variations are well judged and structurally unified. Skuta’s strongest playing occurs in variations involving rapid scales and arpeggios, although he treads carefully over double thirds and repeated notes, and holds back where others passionately surge (Vars 5 and 6, for example). Imagine the hurling, incisive Kovacevich and Pollini Op 2 No 1 recordings reproduced within smaller-scaled parameters, and you’ll have Skuta. I don’t care for his fussy phrase elongations and reverse accents, yet his one-beat-to-a-bar phrasing of the Menuetto truly lilts. The Les Adieux Sonata’s first movement better absorbs Skuta’s rhetorical asides and flexible basic pulse. He sings out the Andante espressivo directly and eloquently but plays it cautious and safe in the joyous, soaring finale.

In Op 111, I acknowledge the unusual clarity and point with which Skuta unravels the Arietta’s rumbling left-hand textures. However, one would welcome a wider range of dynamics and dramatic abandon, both here and in Geoffrey Saba’s live traversals of the last three Beethoven sonatas. Saba seems primarily a gentle, lyrical pianist intent on softening the blow of Beethoven’s blunt edges, such as in the Op 110 Allegro molto’s difficult-to-voice syncopations. He often relaxes the basic pulse in Op 109’s opening movement and third movement theme, Op 110’s Klagender Gesang, and in Op 111’s Arietta to the point where the music’s long lines nearly slip away. Still, Saba is incapable of producing an ugly sound and his sensitive, intelligent musicianship falls easily on the ear.