There was a time when Carl Czerny was one of the most-played composers on the planet. Admittedly, most performances were in private by budding piano virtuosi struggling to impress their teachers. With Czerny’s concert music eclipsed by his educational works, Nimbus’s new initiative in recording the sonatas is invaluable in helping create a more rounded, realistic view of a composer long misunderstood.

A Beethoven pupil, he could recapture his master’s mannerisms – try the opening of the Ninth Sonata, for example – but lacked the intellectual rigour to carry through a convincingly Beethovenian discourse. Czerny’s view of the sonata medium was expansive; of the four sonatas here, Nos 5 and 8 are in five movements, Nos 6 and 9 in six, all lasting at least a full half-hour, with the Sixth at 50'.

For all that he was a maximalist in this respect, his sonatas at times seem like suites, their expressive intent diluted rather than sustained by the extended scale, as in the Ninth. There is poetry aplenty in their slow movements, such as the Fifth’s “Aria” or Sixth’s “Chorale der Böhmen” (and in the Nocturne) and vigour in the faster spans, but the lasting impression is of works not always the sum of their parts. Curiously, the longest piece – No 6 – bucks that trend, and in this fine account emerges as a work of real stature.

Martin Jones proves an assured, persuasive advocate and his performances should alert players and listeners alike to the fact that Czerny was much more than a purveyor of pedagogical tortures to be endured. I am no great admirer of Nimbus’s flat “house sound” but the recording is clear with a good range.