Sometimes, a musician’s last recording (Dinu Lipatti’s Besançon recital is a prime example) brings with it an added poignance. Sometimes, its palpable sense of struggle makes you squirm (think of Bernstein’s 1990 Boston Beethoven Seventh). This documentation of Maurizio Pollini’s final visit to the studio, in 2022, is one of the disappointing ones, a recording that does few favours to the memory of one of the dozen or so greatest pianists of the post-war period.

Granted, Pollini is not the only major pianist to be stymied by Schubert’s G major Sonata. And nothing here is as discouraging as the mind-numbing first movement in Sviatoslav Richter’s Decca account, dragged out well beyond its tolerable length. Even so, it’s hard to listen to Pollini without growing impatient as you wait for some expressivity to burst through. That wait is rarely rewarded. There are, of course, moments of finely wrought playing; but they’re eclipsed by bouts of stiff phrasing, ill-judged dynamics, rhythmic roughness and slate grey timbres, with the result that the music remains largely impassive. For a better option, you might consider Stephen Hough’s gracious reading (Hyperion, 5/22), or, for a more romantically inflected choice, the richly characterised and underappreciated version by Ernst von Dohnányi (Testament, 5/15) – taken, coincidentally, from his last recital (although it was not quite his last recording).

The four-hand Fantasie, performed by Pollini and his son Daniele, is less inert and more sensitive (the last movement opens with a poignant glow). But it too suffers from the untidiness and coarseness that mar the Sonata (listen to how cruelly they pound out the last movement’s fugue) – and it, too, will leave you fidgeting.

Daniele’s solo turn in the Moments musicaux brings us into a different world. Luxurious in detail, alert to the music’s shifting moods (check out the quiet urgency of No 4 or the bite of No 5), discerningly shaded in dynamics and colour (try the refined timbres in the F sharp minor sections of No 2), and wide ranging in tone of voice, it’s an interpretation that gets to the heart of Schubert’s art. For some time, Daniele has been under the shadow of his father; this release makes it clear that it’s time for him to emerge on his own.