Beethoven introduces his Eroica Variations with the theme’s bare-boned architectural essence. Konstantin Scherbakov, however, can’t help but embellish the foundation with a breath pause here and an italicisation there, signifying entertainment up ahead. Sure enough, the pianist fortifies Var 1’s accompaniment with a lilting ‘oom-pah’ effect, while dispatching Var 2’s left-hand part like a forceful walking bass-line. There’s also an airy suppleness to Var 3’s repeated-chord motif that one often doesn’t hear. In Var 9, Scherbakov places the left-hand grace notes slightly off the beat to create an almost bagpipe-like drone, yet he curiously underplays those in Var 13’s right hand, whereas Emanuel Ax relishes their dissonant and obsessive qualities. The lyrical variations and the fugal finale further benefit from Ax’s larger portfolio of dynamics and expressive inflections.

There’s an impassioned and fearless quality to Scherbakov’s best Beethoven-Liszt symphony recordings which emerges only intermittently in the two ‘name’ sonatas here. You sense this in the tamed subito dynamics of the Pathétique’s Grave introduction and in the way the pianist rounds off the first movement’s brash edges. His sustained deliberation over the Adagio cantabile is straightforward to the point of dutiful. By contrast, the Rondo abounds in dynamic contrasts; but Scherbakov’s tapered and sectionalised phrasing draws attention more to the pianist than to the music. The improvisatory nature of the Appassionata’s first movement better absorbs Scherbakov’s pianistically orientated tempo fluctuations and novel articulations. Classical reserve, by contrast, governs Scherbakov’s tightly unified Andante con moto variations. The finale is impressively clear and assured, aside from cavalier details like the clipped rather than sustained opening fortissimo chords, the mannered diminuendo at the end of the Presto coda’s first phrase and an additional D natural that somehow slipped into the third-to-last chord.