Comfortable tempi, astutely highlighted inner voices and well-articulated fingerwork distinguish Olga Rusina’s account of Beethoven’s Op 10 No 3 Sonata, despite her slightly sedate pacing of the outer movements. The Moonlight Sonata’s famous Adagio sostenuto receives a spacious, tonally ripe and well sustained treatment. From there things go downhill. Rusina sleepwalks through the second movement at considerably less than the Allegretto Beethoven prescribes, and lies heavily on the downbeats. Her notey, plodding rendition of the finale comes nowhere close to presto, let alone agitato. The pianist’s considerable rhythmic leeway in the Appassionata’s first movement illuminates nothing in the music and everything about what’s convenient for her hands. It makes a musician like Willem Mengelberg sound like John Eliot Gardiner by comparison!

Her tempo changes throughout the Andante con moto undermine the cumulative effect Beethoven intends when he increases the note values in each successive variation. While the finale’s passagework unquestionably gains from Rusina’s point and clarity (again, the left-hand runs prove particularly distinctive), her rhetorical gearshifts make little intrinsic sense. One glaring example concerns the unwritten ritard she imposes within the accelerando into the coda, totally ruining the build-up. Once the coda starts, Rusina imitates Sviatoslav Richter’s tenutos on the long chords but without that legendary pianist’s animal excitement and drive. The music flies by so fast on the finale page that Rusina is forced to slow down at the climax in order to avoid derailment and any collateral damage by way of wrong notes. At least the engineering is robust, detailed and dynamically vivid.