Unfortunately, Hänssler’s engineering for the penultimate release in Gerhard Oppitz’s Beethoven cycle proves as hollow and distant as its predecessors. Fortunately, Vol 7 offers some of this cycle’s strongest performances. Stern reserve characterises the start of Op 54’s Menuetto, giving no hint of the heightened intensity to come when Oppitz picks up speed in the octaves. The Allegretto is brisk yet clear, highlighted by the pianist’s marvellously off-kilter emphasis of Beethoven’s syncopated accents. Even at less than a bona fide allegro, the little F sharp major’s finale’s witty shifts between major and minor come off well. However, Oppitz truly gives his all in the Hammerklavier. He brings impressive power, sweep and seasoned technique to the outer movements. One might prefer a more biting, angular Scherzo, yet Oppitz’s weighty, expansively phrased Adagio sostenuto does not drag in the least.

Oppitz’s one-time teacher Wilhelm Kempff favoured an intimate style of Beethoven-playing that finds a more overtly “worked out” and textually scrupulous parallel via András Schiff. He is not one to unleash the Moonlight? Sonata’s third movement’s fury, to let the Op 27 No 1 Scherzo scamper like Schnabel, or to sufficiently contrast the Op 26 finale’s lightly cascading toccata-like patterns and bravura descending scales. Instead, Schiff takes great pains to distinguish slurred and staccato articulation, with results that are either impossibly mannered (the Moonlight’s Allegretto) or stylishly revealing (Op 26’s Scherzo and Op 28’s Andante). Yet whether the performances illuminate or irritate, Schiff consistently conveys a sense of timbral differentiation between registers akin to the instruments of Beethoven’s time, together with their unique pedal effects. For example, listen to the pungent resonance of the bass notes in the Op 26 first-movement minore variation, or how the vaporous haze of the Moonlight’s celebrated Adagio sostenuto never turns muddy. In contrast to heavier, rhetorical readings, Schiff’s straightforward interpretation takes Beethoven’s alla breve marking at face value.

If Schiff aims to transform his Steinway into an early-18th-century fortepiano, Ronald Brautigam pushes his Paul McNulty instrument to its dynamic limits yet remains in total physical control. Like Richard Goode, Brautigam subtly modifies the basic pulse of Op 31 No 1’s first movement exposition without softening the “kerplop” effect of Beethoven’s deliberately un-synchronised hands. Similar freedom and proportion govern the finale, while graceful rumination colours the long central movement’s decorative arabesques. In the Tempest Sonata, the Adagio’s haunting phrases easily float over the bar-lines, providing a respite to the headlong intensity Brautigam stirs up in the outer movements. Op 31 No 3 is equally outstanding. The Menuetto particularly showcases this fortepiano’s twangy, harpsichord-like overtones, while Brautigam uncompromisingly plunges into the Presto con fuoco at full speed with the detail radar cranked up, leaving no notes under the table.