Rarely have I heard a distinguished pianist make Beethoven sound like some latter-day Viennese Scarlatti, the tone dry, the accentuation snappy, the tempos, at times, remorselessly driven. I say 'at times' because Kocsis frequently takes a slightly broader, more plastic view of lyrical subject groups; and his playing of Beethoven's early Adagios is concentrated and intense, the silences strictly counted and unnervingly pure. There are moments when all this adds up to a plausibly neo-classical approach to Beethoven, expertly realized—much of the Op. 10 No. 1 is a tour de force—but too often the playing strips the music bare of any vestige of real wit, humanity or (in the case of the D minor Sonata) imaginative reach. The hard, dry piano sound—Kocsis uses a severe palette, frugal in its use of extraneous colour—is no doubt part-and-parcel of all this, though the recording hardly helps. The piano has always been a difficult instrument to reproduce since the microphone has yet to be invented that can convey the rich 'carry' of a great player's sound into the wider spaces of a recital hall. But, as an aficionado of the piano repertory was remarking to me the other day, it is surprising how questionable standards of piano recording currently are and how little this is remarked upon by reviewers. I suspect that digital sound has exacerbated a problem that has already been there—that is, the need to place microphones unnervingly close to the sound-source to ensure a proper degree of focus and immediacy. Whatever the explanation, the sound we have on the present discs manages to be both electronically vivid and musically desiccated.'