Collectors who own the superlative set of the Brahms piano concertos which Nelson Freire made with Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in the middle of the last decade (9/06) will know that he has the pianistic firepower to make his mark in Beethoven’s Emperor. And so in some measure he does; this is a work which will always make its effect. Yet behind its bullish persona lie gradations of light and shade that require a specifically Beethovenian fineness and surety of touch. Its greatest interpreters – Curzon, Kempff, Gilels, Kovacevich, Perahia – have that. On the evidence of this new recording, Freire’s virtuosity is of a more all-purpose kind.

The orchestral contribution is prompt and purposeful though occasionally over intrusive. I can’t imagine Beethoven expecting the solo cello he asks for at bar 157 of the opening movement, where the piano’s leggiermente B minor subject thins to a single line, to sound quite so much like a ghost rumbling in the cellarage.

In a booklet interview, Freire says ‘It makes sense: the last sonata and the last concerto,’ before adding, by way of contradiction, that the works are not from the same period and that Beethoven still had a long way to travel before he wrote his last sonata. I’ve always thought this a more or less inadmissible coupling: heroic E flat hurled brutally aside by the most frightening of all Beethoven’s opening salvos. Here surely are two largely alien worlds. Consistent with his own view of the matter, Freire’s Op 111 is strong on thrusting narrative; rather vaguer when it comes to those physical and metaphysical elements which a Schnabel, an Arrau or a Pollini identify and define. I think of Freire’s strangely decorous treatment of the fioriture during the expressive arrest midway through the first-movement exposition or his casual treatment of the movement’s close where the plagal cadences which sound over a rolling bass are unevenly voiced.

A piano sonata can work as coupling for the Emperor. The luminous late E major Sonata, Op 109, was added to the CD reissue of Stephen Kovacevich’s classic account of the concerto (Philips, 12/89). Here are fine performances by a thoroughbred Beethovenian. What’s more, Kovacevich’s editors allow a decent pause between the two works, unlike Freire’s who have the tumultuous off beat minor key start to Op 111 crashing in only seconds after the concerto’s end. How thoughtless is that?