Jonathan Biss begins Beethoven’s Op 10 No 1 Sonata’s first movement by ever so slightly elongating and slowing down phrases, and creates a similarly mannered impression when he tapers the second subject to the point where the accompaniment nearly overpowers the melody. By contrast, his fundamentalist approach to the Prestissimo finale defines relentless bravura and could use a little bit more punctuation and breathing room, but he finds his centre with a lyrically sustained and eloquent Adagio molto.

Biss projects the lightness and wit of Op 22’s Allegro con brio as crisply as Richard Goode and Wilhelm Kempff but the end results are a shade too square when heard alongside Paul Lewis’s more incisive, dynamically contrasted traversal (Harmonia Mundi, 12/06), while Biss’s clear-cut Allegretto yields to Kovacevich’s more direct and tonally translucent reading (EMI, 9/98). In Op 26, it’s a toss-up between Biss’s refreshingly animated way with the Andante con variazioni and Angela Hewitt’s seamless tempo relationships and more differentiated articulation (Hyperion, 9/10). But Biss’s linear contouring and razor-sharp touch in the Scherzo leave Lewis’s dainty deliberation at the starting gate.

If Biss is too reserved and small-scale in the Funeral March compared to the sterner, bleaker Hewitt and Richter, his subtle accentuations give voice to the finale’s part-writing and cross-rhythmic nature. The dynamism and sweep that enliven Les adieux’s outer movements in the hands of Solomon, Schnabel and (more recently) Nelson Freire overshadow Biss’s comparably brisk but more cautious fingerwork. Audiences seem to inspire more dangerous and no less technically assured Beethoven-playing from Biss; perhaps a live concert would be a better context for Onyx to continue cultivating their Biss/Beethoven merger.