Paavali Jumppanen’s Beethoven cycle gets better with each new instalment and nearly everything here is a keeper. He obviously adores Op 31 No 1: listen to the way he underlines the ‘ker-plopping’ effect of the Allegro vivace’s desynchronised chords with ever-so-subtle rhythmic distensions and shifts of emphasis, and without pulling focus from the basic pulse. Despite an expansive tempo for the Adagio grazioso, the music buoyantly moves forward by virtue of Jumppanen’s strong left-hand underpinning and by avoiding slackening or tapering the fast decorative right-hand passagework. The term grazioso returns in a lyrically parsed finale.

Listeners familiar with Jumppanen’s Tempest Sonata from a live Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum podcast will find this new recording bolder and more dynamically assertive in the outer movements. My only quibble concerns his neutral, matter-of-fact treatment of the hushed left-hand broken octaves that pianists such as Gieseking, Schnabel and Kempff made so disparately memorable. There are brasher Op 31 No 3 first movements to be had, yet Jumppanen’s fluttering semi-staccato shaping of the long lines equally invigorates, as does his crisply pointed woodwind-like articulation in the Scherzo. If the Presto con fuoco finale appears to rush ahead at times, the fault is with your ears, not with Jumppanen’s perfectly poised fingers and his over-the-bar-line phrasing.

The little Op 78 receives one of its finest recorded performances. It begins with a sensitively inflected, intelligently proportioned Allegro ma non troppo, followed by a rollicking Allegro vivace that revels in the music’s sudden major/minor mode shifts. Lightness and simplicity is exactly what Op 79 needs and receives in the first two movements. Jumppanen holds back at the third-movement Vivace’s outset, then works his way up to tempo – an unorthodox yet oddly effective touch. Op 90 fares best in the quasi-Schubertian second movement but the first movement is a shade heavy and square compared to recent contenders from Stewart Goodyear (Marquis) and François-Frédéric Guy (ZZT, 8/13). However, Jumppanen triumphs in Les adieux, fusing Schnabel’s surging ebullience and Solomon’s suave technical finish into a powerful, uplifting and personalised whole.

As before, Ondine provides state-of-the-art engineering and Jumppanen contributes superb annotations. I look forward to the fifth and final volume, which will include Op 7, the Pathétique and the last three sonatas.