No doubt about it, compared to the Mozart piano sonatas Haydn’s are still neglected. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s extended project for Chandos is – I hope – ongoing: he has promised us volumes of sonatas dispatched in the course of his travels like postcards, ‘undertaken with the greatest passion for trying to convey as vividly as possible to 21st-century ears the boundless treasures of this sublime music’. I’ve got everything in his series so far and some of the comparable one by Marc-André Hamelin for Hyperion. Of him I am less sure. The high finish is admirable, if a bit predictable and heartless, and he engages only fitfully with Haydn’s humanity and sophistication. The innocuous assurance takes him down conventional routes and he plays what’s written with never any decoration or variation of repeats. Leon McCawley takes that road too.

I like McCawley’s vigour and spiritedness in quick numbers – well in place, for example, in the outer movements of the C major ‘English’ Sonata (No 50 in Hoboken’s catalogue), as well as in the fine first movement of the E minor Sonata (No 34) that so many of us learnt when we were young. You sense he’s a cultivated player with exceptional technical address, and his rhythm is immaculate whatever the tempo. But that’s as far as he gets. He gives a reading of the printed text as if afraid of accepting any challenge towards freethinking adventurousness. So, you listen on, maybe disappointed in particular in the C minor Sonata (No 20) that Haydn is being kept in his traditional place as a pleasing ‘opener’, allowing a recitalist to settle and warm up –Mozart’s sonatas used to be diminished similarly. Bavouzet however has shown that this C minor work can be counted one of the miracles of Haydn’s earlier years, and even as the first great piano sonata of all. But you don’t arrive at that position without taking a leap, intellectually and musically and with instinct there too, to get way beyond ‘what’s written’.

The last sonata of all, No 52 in E flat, the one that exploits everything Haydn had learnt about piano-writing and its capacity for imitating orchestral colour, stacks up much better with McCawley. Thereafter the F minor Variations is another let-down, his performance not engaging with one of the 18th century’s tragic utterances for the instrument. I could go on. I have known McCawley’s playing since the 1993 Leeds Competition. What’s certain is that he deserves better recording than Somm has given him here. The piano is not well tuned and is reproduced with a harsh metallic edge that is unpleasant. I put up with it before going back to Brendel in the Variations (Decca, 1/10), to Bavouzet’s Chandos series (Vol 3 – 12/11) and to a double album of Haydn András Schiff made for Teldec nearly 20 years ago (it includes Sonata No 52 – 5/99). McCawley may not quite measure up to these great players but it’s the sound that is such a drawback here.