Having continually extended her repertoire these past six decades, Elisabeth Leonskaja turns here to the Second Viennese School with three of Schoenberg’s mature piano works preceded by those of Berg and Webern for what proves an absorbing while not ideally balanced recital.

Berg’s solitary Sonata emerges with no mean appreciation of its intensified pivoting between late Romanticism and that nascent modernism breaking through the initial poise for a starkly rhetorical development, barely allayed in the fractured reprise or the regretful coda. Rhetoric had been largely eradicated by the time of Webern’s Variations, whether in the limpid motivic eddying or tensile rhythmic gestures of its initial sections, then the more explicit variational process of a finale whose ultimate dissolution can seldom have been so eloquently realised.

Similar poise is evident in the first of Schoenberg’s Op 11 Pieces, its Chopinesque delicacy complemented with the Lisztian ominousness of its successor’s fugitive ostinato pattern and dislocated exchanges that never achieve catharsis or even closure, other than in a third piece whose aggression sounds slightly too circumspect here. More integrated overall, the Op 19 Little Pieces teasingly juxtapose the deadpan and the capricious prior to a luminous closing evocation. The Op 25 Suite can be all too didactic but Leonskaja pointedly avoids this in a combative Praeludium and a Gavotte whose drollness frames a deftly inflected Musette. The ironic Menuett similarly frames a gnomic Trio, but the highlights are an Intermezzo of sustained pathos then a Gigue whose treacherous pianism is compulsively entertaining.

A pity Schoenberg’s Opp 23 and 33 could not have been included (maybe by omitting the Berg’s exposition repeat) or that the Webern was not placed at the end, but this is yet a fine demonstration of Leonskaja’s commitment to music whose fascination – and provocation – remains endless.