Although Claudio Arrau’s Beethoven hardly lacks catalogue representation, this first release of live Swedish Radio performances from April 5, 1960, is revealing in several respects. For one, the slightly distant microphone placement conveys much of the colour, depth and dynamic proportions of Arrau’s full-bodied sonority as one experienced it in a concert hall. What’s more, Arrau often lived more dangerously in front of an audience.

By 1960 Arrau had consolidated the broad, massive, rhetorical Beethoven style familiar from his later recordings, yet the 57 year-old pianist could still unleash firebrand virtuosity at full capacity. In Op 110’s first movement, Arrau’s uncommonly distinct articulation of the left-hand passagework is more shapely and nuanced compared alongside the studio versions, while the Fugue’s increasingly elaborate fingerwork takes on greater animation and urgency with little aid from the pedal. Op 111 emerges as a large-scale epic packed with dramatic tension and sustaining power. The hall ambience creates a three-dimensional hue around Arrau’s disembodied chains of trills and the Arietta’s bounding dotted rhythms press ahead without losing the slightest definition. Firmness and flexibility triumphantly merge as Arrau builds the Appassionata’s first movement’s sweeping textures from the bottom up, mixing and matching timbres in accordance with the music’s harmonic trajectory. In the Andante con moto’s first variation, Arrau illuminates the aching dissonance by laying into the off-beat bass notes, and he allows the finale’s hidden melodies and motifs within the busy passagework their full due. Only the Presto coda betrays the tiniest hint of fatigue.

Jonathan Summers’s perceptive annotations add further value to a release that enhances if not necessarily adds to Arrau’s extensive legacy.