To my ears, Haydn’s ‘Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser’ Variations lose something in translation en route between the original string quartet setting and the composer’s keyboard version. The linear simplicity sounds rather stark and threadbare when compared alongside the strings’ timbral differentiation and sustaining capabilities. That said, Sarah Beth Briggs’s performance conveys thoughtful dynamic contrasts and a stylistic purity that will strike listeners as either selfless or sombre. Her Haydn C major Sonata fares best in her excellently sung-out slow movement, yet the outer movements lack the pointed humour and bracing articulation of Sviatoslav Richter (Sony) and Marc-André Hamelin (Hyperion, 5/07). You’ll find comparable litheness and forward energy in the finale of Mozart’s A minor Sonata but the dogged literalism in much of Briggs’s phrasing throughout the first movement misses the poignant, quasi-operatic point that Murray Perahia, Richard Goode and Lili Kraus boldly reveal.

The outer movements of Briggs’s ‘little’ Schubert A major Sonata fall into pretty, square-cut patterns, with little of the mellifluous long-lined shaping one hears from Klára Würtz (Piano Classics) and Anna Malikova (Classical Records), not to mention the faster, more angular Leon Fleisher (Sony). Still, one must acknowledge her understated poise and superb finger legato in the Andante.

Briggs sheds her inhibitions and dons her most characterful and imaginative pianistic garb for the three Hans Gál preludes. I suspect that with less catalogue competition breathing down her neck in these works, Briggs may have felt freer in the face of the unforgiving microphone, not to mention her innate affinity for Gal’s idiom. And speaking of microphones, Briggs and her piano benefit from robust, full-bodied sound.