In 2013 James Brawn launched his ‘Beethoven Odyssey’, a survey of the composer’s 32 piano sonatas that reaches its final destination here with Vol 9. My reviews of previous volumes characterised the pianist’s essentially lean, dry-point style as akin to pianists so antipodal as Seymour Lipkin and Wilhelm Kempff, in marked contrast with the heroic dynamism of the equally antipodal Artur Schnabel and Claudio Arrau. Not surprisingly, Brawn brings strong contrapuntal awareness to the A major Sonata’s opening movement, as if the lines were assigned to members of a string quartet. He navigates the Scherzo’s difficult skips and obsessive dotted rhythms well, albeit without the decisive, stinging authority heard in Arrau’s 1950s EMI recording or from more recent contenders such as Stewart Goodyear and Igor Levit. Similarly, the Fugue is clear but careful.

Although Brawn’s basic tempo for the Hammerklavier Sonata’s first movement understandably falls short of the composer’s admittedly optimistic metronome mark, his playing of the exposition compensates with palpable sweep and forward impetus that sadly bogs down in the development section’s fughetta and never really recovers. In the sequence of upward broken fifths and sixths in bars 224 25, Brawn plays the ‘inspired misprint’ A sharp rather than the ‘correct’ A natural, a controversial option that I personally prefer. His Scherzo has appropriate point and bite, save for mild-mannered upward F major scales that need a thousand times more ferocity.

In the Adagio sostenuto, Brawn draws upon a bevy of expressive devices (a breath mark here, a caesura there, tapering at cadences, breaking of hands and so forth), yet with little intrinsic sustaining power. Brawn masterfully times the fourth movement’s introductory pauses and mood shifts. However, his supple and jazzily etched fingerwork in the Fugue’s exposition soon begins to grow thicker and heavier, with the pulse considerably slowing down over time. Given the cycle’s many admirable qualities and memorable performances, it’s a shame this concluding volume doesn’t quite reach the same standards.