With Vol 8, Martin Roscoe comes within spitting distance of completing his Beethoven sonata cycle; the ninth and final instalment will presumably appear after the composer’s 250th-anniversary festivities die down. However, there’s plenty to celebrate here. I once likened Roscoe’s poised and scrupulous Beethoven-playing to that of Walter Gieseking and Solomon, yet the coiled intensity of his Appassionata suggests another iconic Beethovenian: Rudolf Serkin. Note, for example, the outer movements’ relentless drive, rhythmic exactitude and sheer nervous energy, while the central variations fluidly unfold by way of tightly unified yet never rigid tempo relationships.

Conversely, Roscoe takes more leeway over the Les adieux Sonata’s first-movement introduction and employs liberal rhetorical devices elsewhere including cadential ritards and emphatic accents. The only time the momentum sags is in the finale, where some of the rapid passagework grows heavier and less supple as it progresses, in contrast to, say, Stewart Goodyear’s consistently lithe and buoyant reading (Marquis).

Roscoe balances Op 101’s first movement’s lines with steady deliberation, as if his fingers were members of a string quartet. Perhaps the hair-trigger accuracy of Roscoe’s dotted rhythms in the March suggests more of Pollini’s purposeful bleakness than Igor Levit’s playful audacity. The same observation applies to the fugal finale. One can’t deny Roscoe’s evenly matched trills and painstaking voice-leading, not to mention the cumulative grip of his intelligently judged dynamics, resulting in powerful climaxes. To be sure, Levit’s faster and lighter approach reveals more of the music’s joy and exhilaration, and so do the Op 101 recordings by Murray Perahia (Sony, 1/05) and Richard Goode (Nonesuch, 9/89, 3/94).

Still and all, Roscoe’s strong musical mind often puts a fresh spin on this thrice-familiar repertoire and bodes well for Vol 9’s projected centrepiece, the Hammerklavier Sonata.