Alice Sara Ott, the 23-year-old German-Japanese pianist, seems to be a musician in a hurry; since signing to DG in 2008 we’ve had Tchaikovsky and Liszt concertos, solo Liszt and Chopin and now Beethoven. In the booklet she addresses the question of recording two seminal sonatas so early in her career (“one goes one’s way and leaves behind a trace, and this trace is an expression of what I feel at a given moment”), just as she talks of her love for Beethoven, the differences between early and late C major; she quotes the “Heiligenstadt Testament” to prove her point. In other words, she does everything to justify this recording.

Except that it’s not followed through in her playing. Her fluency is impressive and the technical issues presented by these two sonatas – with Op 2 No 3 arguably the most bolshily virtuoso in the entire cycle – are handled with ease. And she never does anything interpretatively jarring. But sometimes I wished she would take the odd risk. Where’s the wit in the finale of Op 2 No 3? Or that miraculous change of colour in the lead-up to the coda in the finale of the Waldstein? And in Op 2 No 3’s tiptoed Scherzo her Trio is a somewhat polite affair, playing down the shock value of Beethoven’s sudden onslaught of notes. She adds to the sonatas the Andante favori (originally intended for Op 53) and the late Rondo a capriccio. Again, her playing is unfailingly adept without revealing the finer nuances of the pieces.

So why would you buy this disc? Perhaps it’s of interest if you’re following the trajectory of her career. But if it’s the repertoire that interests you then this, I fear, will not fit the bill.