Despite a very finished technique, Ronan O’Hora doesn’t quite measure up to requirements. Pellucid pianism isn’t enough. Temperament is needed too, to dig beneath the surface of the notes to expose the nooks and crannies of a composer’s personal language. And O’Hora holds back from an exposé of Haydn’s language, most noticeably in the two minor-key pieces. Sonata No 33, said by Misha Donat to have “a strong claim to be regarded as the first unequivocally great work in the history of the piano sonata”, is Haydn’s Sturm und Drang for a solo instrument. An opening movement of chromatic harmonies, changes in tempo and abrupt moves from forte to piano, coupled to a finale with its own moments of violence, offer opportunities for expressive possibilities from which neither András Schiff nor Andreas Staier on fortepiano shies away.

O’Hora does. He only hints and suggests. Much of the wonder of incident in this sonata passes him by, as it does in the other sonatas, though he responds positively to the contrasts inherent in the first movement of No 58. Otherwise there is a reluctance to grapple with knotty matters that pays poor dividends in the F minor Variations, HobXVII/6. O’Hora senses its melancholy but negates the effect by an emotional reserve that spills into the angry coda as well. Angela Hewitt and Staier are intensely concentrated in their different ways, Staier even playing the five-bar bridge passage before the return of the theme that O’Hora and Hewitt (and many others) inexplicably omit.