Exquisite in taste is the slow movement of Op 22, a beautifully paced Adagio, in the hands of Angela Hewitt. But Beethoven’s extra instruction, con molta espressione, implying passion too, is kept at a distance. She is reserved, as she is in the first-movement Allegro where con brio is kept at a distance too. Hewitt drops her guard in the last two movements, the finale mysteriously questing yet suitably dramatic in the B flat minor and F minor episodes. Paul Lewis and François-Frédéric Guy are, however, better attuned to the work as a whole.

As is Alfred Brendel to Op 31 No 3, authoritative in utterance and in each movement building a palpable continuum of tension that escapes Hewitt. She doesn’t seem comfortable with rhetoric, humour or grandeur, the last movement a succession of notes too fast for a Presto in 6/8 and far from con fuoco. Fastidious pianism isn’t enough. And Hewitt doesn’t depend on it in Op 101. If in the first movement she finds the balance between liveliness and deepest inner feeling not easy to attain, or is shy of expressing maximum longing in the third, she is uninhibited in the March, its dotted rhythm crisp and clean, the canonic Trio suitably shadowy. She also repeats its first 10 bars and, by pertinently varied tempi, steadily but strikingly defines the contrasts in the finale described by Robert Hatten as a ‘fusion of pastoral, learned and heroic topics’.