In her booklet comments, Tamara Stefanovich recalls playing Boulez’s Second Sonata for the composer, and how he conducted her playing using ‘generous visionary gestures, always showing where and how to ride the waves of drama’. Such long-lined flexibility informs her recorded performance. Certain pianists take Boulez’s Extrèmement rapide directive in the first movement to indicate a relentless and pressurised barrage of notes flying all over the place; Maurizio Pollini did so with unprecedented scintillation (DG, 7/78). By contrast, Stefanovich strives to convey the musicality beneath the manifesto, so to speak. She gives the phrases room to breath and congeal, while shaping the stabbing trills rather than shoehorning them in pursuit of metronomic rectitude, uncovering melodic signposts in the process. In this sense Stefanovich’s interpretation is closer to Yvonne Loriod’s pioneering recording, which also sings more than it stings. This is especially true in the slow movement, where Stefanovich’s attention to the composer’s pedal indications and careful dynamic deployment yield less abstract and more colourful a narrative trajectory than usual. The brief third movement gains welcome textural and expressive contrast in how Stefanovich imparts a special timbral character to each section, along with her mastery of transitions. Here Stefanovich’s astute parsing of the dense Mouvement dédoublé sequence’s foreground and background voices recalls Idil Biret’s comparably transparent Naxos recording. While Pollini’s gaunt ascetisicm and purposeful bleakness will always have its champions, both Stefanovich’s pianism and Pentatone’s ample sound recording cast this sonata in warm three-dimensional light.

Following four years of study with Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler published his Piano Sonata No 1 in 1923 with a dedication to his teacher. Although one hears traces of Schoenberg’s handiwork (along with harmonic sequences that wouldn’t be out of place in Berg or Weill), the caustic wit and terse economy that would fully manifest in Eisler’s later works are ever present. Again, Stefanovich’s meticulous attention to articulation and variety of touch set reference standards, although I personally prefer the scampering abandon and slightly faster tempo in Thomas Larcher’s equally compelling Harmonia Mundi recording.

While Stefanovich faces more incendiary catalogue competition in Bartók’s Sonata (Zoltán Kocsis, Goran Filipec, Murray Perahia and Martha Argerich), few orchestrate the piano-writing so well. In the first movement, for example, the right-hand octaves sparkle against the mellifluous left-hand ostinato chords, while the sensitively calibrated melody/accompaniment balances in the slow movement channel a string quartet. Likewise, Shostakovich’s early Piano Sonata No 1 receives an intelligently paced and respectful reading that doesn’t foam at the mouth or overshoot its climaxes in the manner of pianists who treat this music like Prokofiev on steroids. Finally, Stefanovich offers Scarlatti’s B minor Kk87 in a halting, searching and meditative manner. Her interpretation is less about public performance than self-communion, as if to decompress or retreat from the ‘Organised Delirium’ that dominates this recital’s four heavy-hitting sonatas.