Among British fortepianists today, Melvyn Tan is certainly one of the leading lights. This record attests to his formidable technique and musicianship. As sheer piano playing, the Waldstein is particularly impressive: the first movement fleet and quite dazzling, the Rondo a real tour de force of sustained and attentive playing, every accent and every dynamic marking faithfully observed and given due meaning. The instrument, by Derek Adlam after a Nanette Streicher piano of 1814, has a bright, incisive sound, recorded rather close here. I am a little less sure about Tan's command of the music's structure and its tensions, the development of the first movement needs a little more of conscious shaping, possibly, than it receives here, and the Rondo's expansive design would have been helped, too, by a stronger sense of where the music is going and when it is going to get there. And the short central movement would have repaid more intensity. Similar points apply to Les adieuxi where the fast movements are done with tremendous panache, the finale especially having plenty of drama and sensitivity in its quicksilver changes of mood. But here and there more deliberation, more gravitas, would have been welcome.
The Appassionata goes best of the three. A modern piano to some extent cushions the originality and indeed the harshness of some of Beethoven's piano writing, Tan evades nothing, and the results as heard here can be quite uncomfortable, as Beethoven doubtless intended—some of the high, sharply accented chords near the beginning are a case in point. Here Tan does guide us effectively into the recapitulation, which he proceeds to play particularly vividly with its glittering cascades of notes. And the finale too, along with a fine, fiery momentum, has a real sense of scale. If the slow movement is lacking in mystery, however, I would not put it down solely to the instrument. Poetic imagination is not Tan's strongest point, he is in a sense an austere player, and he uses modest rubato. Still, these are powerful and brilliant performances, and give a very good, perhaps slightly alarming idea of how Beethoven expected his piano sonatas to sound.'