Part of a complete cycle of the Beethoven sonatas, this issue confirms Anton Kuerti’s deeply personal and musicianly qualities. His opening to Op 101 (for him, ‘like roaming the hills of springtime without any appointment to keep’) is suitably devotional and his way with the second movement march, whose dotted rhythms so profoundly influenced Schumann, is deft and spry. The third movement becomes a brief but profound memory of former travail resolved in a provocatively interior view of the ebullient finale. In such hands the gnomic concluding pages take on a near-mystic aura and so, too, does much of the Hammerklavier, the so-called ‘Everest of the Keyboard’.

Kuerti ignores (sensibly?) Beethoven’s metronome mark for the opening Allegro and both here and in the massive fugal finale his lucid rather than remorseless exposition allows a wealth of detail to shine through. His way with the Adagio may be more romantically inflected, less ineffable, than from the greatest interpreters (Kempff and Solomon among them) but it is never less than personal and musicianly.

Analekta’s sound is satisfactory, and these performances admirably confirm Kuerti’s view of the essential difference between middle and late Beethoven (‘like seeing a mountain whose grandeur is visible compared to a neighbouring pinnacle whose summit is hidden by clouds and whose upper reaches are created by our fantasy’).