Faultless pianism. Every note and chord is perfectly weighted, every dynamic is meticulously observed, pedalling is clean and tone never degenerates into stridency. Garrick Ohlsson is a fastidious musician, fine on detail and superfine in execution. But in most of the earlier sonatas, he plays safe and avoids close involvement with the music. The first movement of Op 22 is indeed Allegro con brio but rather literal. Ohlsson is not willing to express himself beyond a certain point; nor is he willing to accept in its entirety Beethoven’s invitation to molto espressione in the second. Here, too, there are self-imposed limits. They extend to the rest of the sonata and also the first movement of Op 27 No 1.

Thus far, Ohlsson is curiously dispassionate; and it is difficult to say if the close recording adds to this impression, though the sound itself is very good, a few shallow notes and odd spurious harmonic notwithstanding. Still, the remaining movements find him in a more committed frame of mind; and most committed in Op 110. This lofty sonata receives a lofty interpretation, but it is not an impersonal one because Ohlsson doesn’t stand back from the music. So he scales the sort of heights on which the work stands, and is equally at home with its serenity and rhetoric. His concentration in the slow movement (though the contrasts between una corda and tutte le corde are not distinct enough) and controlled build-up of the fugal finale are singularly impressive.