‘As a pianoforte player,’ the first edition of Grove’s Dictionary tells us, ‘Moscheles was distinguished by a crisp and incisive touch, clear and precise phrasing, and a pronounced preference for minute accentuation. He played octaves with stiff wrists, and was chary in the use of the pedals.’ Edward Dannreuther, who wrote the entry, a distinguished professor at the Royal College of Music, was a pupil of Moscheles, so we may take his description as gospel. The same description will serve to characterise the playing of Michele Bolla, an Italian whose name is new to me but who seems to have been around since the early 1990s and specialises in performing on historical pianos. The one he plays here is a 2018 copy of an 1819 Graf by Paul McNulty. The heavier construction of a Graf fortepiano means it has a different sound to those instruments we usually associate with period performances of Beethoven and music of the early 19th century – a rapid decay, of course, but a rounder, fuller tone.

The CD’s title should more accurately be ‘The Complete Sonatas for Solo Piano’, for there are two sonatas (Opp 47 and 112) for four hands, as well as the early Sonatina, Op 4. As to the music, Mozart, Weber and Beethoven are the chief influences in all four of the present works. The first, Op 22 in D, is pleasant enough without the structural tension and strong thematic material to sustain interest throughout all three movements. The next, Op 27 in B flat, opens with a sparky, Weberesque Allegro (Bolla declines to take the exposition repeat) followed by a particularly dreary set of variations on Hans Nägeli’s ‘Freut euch des Lebens’ (‘Life let us cherish’) for the second movement, and ending with a charming Tempo de valse rondo.

The Sonata in E, Op 41, from 1816 and dedicated to Beethoven, is altogether more individual and original. The longest of its four movements is the third (Romance: Andante espressivo), succeeded by a Rondo scherzando, a fine illustration of Bolla’s lovely touch and his identification with Moscheles’s pianism (vide supra), and where there is only one bar in the entire work which is marked to be played con pédale [sic].

The best is last: the Op 49 Sonata in F sharp minor, one of surprisingly few one-movement sonatas written in the 19th century. It is subtitled Sonate mélancolique, though there is little particularly mélancolique about it (several times, Bolla is sent scurrying around the keyboard for extended passages) save for the opening and closing desolate bars. Fine performances, these, and well recorded. They serve Moscheles well and might just tempt more pianists to investigate Opp 41 and 49. The booklet could have benefited from closer inspection.