Marc-André Hamelin’s third Haydn volume reaches a halfway mark in 60 or so sonatas of tireless range, wit and inventiveness. And, as in Hyperion’s first two double-CD issues (5/07, 10/09), you are left to marvel at both composer and interpreter. How instructive, too, to be told by Richard Wigmore in his notes that if Haydn took a modest view of his skills as a performer, he compensated with an endlessly evolving compositional virtuosity. Time and again he sets up a convention or ‘polished galanterie’ only to enliven and vivify it with a teasing assortment of diversions and surprises. This is hardly the same as ‘facetiousness’ (a celebrated pianist who once told me that unlike Mozart, Haydn should be dining with the servants rather than the aristocrats).

True, works such as the great C minor Sonata and the F minor Variations are exceptional in their expressive intensity but if ‘brightness’ only occasionally ‘falls from the air’ (Thomas Nashe), the majority of the sonatas, with their volte-face humour and open-hearted delight in the unexpected, reflect a joy in compositional wizardry. Such qualities are dazzlingly articulated by Hamelin, with one performance after another of crystalline brilliance and musicianship. Hear his gloriously perky and resilient opening to the G major Sonata (HobXVI/6) or the way he conveys the mock grandeur of the B flat Sonata (HobXVI/2), almost as if the citizens of Lilliput were on parade, before relishing the Largo’s sudden melancholy (molto espressivo). He captures all of the C minor Sonata’s grandeur (its simultaneously elegiac and assuaging use of sixths and thirds) and is warmly conciliatory in the Andante before firing off the finale’s testy and explosive whimsy. These are magnificent performances and clearly a prime love for Hamelin.