The discrepancy in timing looks drastic, but with one exception I shall mention it reflects nothing more than two equally valid views of the music. As followers of John O'Conor's cycle (this is Volume 6) will expect, his priorities are warm, finely-graded sound, scrupulous attention to the text, and inwardness rather than dramatic projection. This is not heaven-storming Beethoven, and it does not seek to plumb the depths; but its understatement conceals plentiful insights, is thoroughly distinctive, and makes for the kind of shared living-room experience that more highly-charged approaches often preclude. Telarc's recording maintains the exceptionally high standards of previous issues in this cycle.
By contrast Marios Papadopoulos seeks a more immediate kind of involvement and identifies more with the traditional struggling-creator image of Beethoven. Initially this poses problems, and the first two movements of Op. 109 do not take well to his heavy underlining, especially as the instrument itself is unpleasantly tinny in the high treble. But the variations build impressively, and the A flat Sonata also rises to peaks of no mean grandeur.
Curiously both pianists disappoint in the Arietta of Op. 111. After an attractively lucid and articulate performance, O'Conor is prosaic in the crucial other-worldly trills (11'28'' - 12'43''), while Papadopoulos has already scuppered himself with a disastrous drop in tempo for the Fourth Variation at 10'36''—his basic tempo is in any case extremely slow, and at 22'35'' the movement becomes absurdly protracted.
There are surprisingly few single-disc versions of these three sonatas and no serious competitors among them for Pollini on DG. The 84-year-old Serkin definitely sounds his age in his Austrian Radio recording, also on DG. But O'Conor's undemonstrative playing has something distinctive and satisfying to offer, especially in the E major and A flat major Sonatas.'