Many of Beethoven's shorter piano works, including some that are among his earliest pieces, hover at the fringes of his output, explored because they are by Beethoven rather than because of their intrinsic merit. Jeno Jando is now trawling through these works for Naxos, and Vol. 1 mostly comprises collections of dances, although it also contains the infamous Fur Elise, randomly grouped with three other vignettes (one of them a fragment) on track 1. The main rival to this project is Vol. 6 of DG's Complete Beethoven Edition (which includes all Beethoven's piano works except the 32 piano sonatas - A/97). The 12 German Dances, WoO8 were originally written for orchestra (in which form, contrary to the Naxos booklet-notes, they have been published) and the piano version included here is not found in the DG set.
Jando's style is straightforward but limited. He doesn't really project sufficient expressive variety to make a persuasive case for repeated listening, and Gianluca Cascioli, who plays many of these works for the DG set, is consistently more imaginative and makes Jando seem merely dutiful by comparison. Mikhail Pletnev is also more vivid and colourful in the six Minuets, WoO10; without a discerning elegance and character these pieces can easily become tiresome and I certainly wouldn't recommend listening to Jando's disc in one sitting. The recording is a touch smudgy and doesn't have an entirely natural bloom. In sum, this disc is useful to fill any gaps in a Beethoven collection, but is hardly a source of great inspiration.'