A year ago, Deutsche Grammophon inaugurated its exclusive contract with Grigory Sokolov by releasing a recital of Mozart and Chopin he gave at the Salzburg festival in 2008. This follow-up includes part of another Salzburg recital: Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, and the Rameau and Brahms encores following it come from the 2013 festival, while the Schubert was recorded in Warsaw three months earlier. It’s a less consistent collection than the earlier one, but still with enough moments of pianistic magic to make it thoroughly memorable. The Hammerklavier is certainly different from the norm – the outer movements are classically restrained, almost relaxed, with miraculously transparent textures, and the emotional centre of gravity is rooted in a radiant account of the slow movement, though the sense of wholeness and scale of the sonata are unmistakably retained. Some of the Schubert is more problematic, though. Sokolov emphasises the emotional and dynamic extremes of the D899 Impromptus with a sometimes exaggerated rubato that can be uncomfortable, and he turns the three posthumous pieces of D946 into major statements too, so that the first of them in E flat minor lasts longer than his opening movement of the Hammerklavier. Perhaps best of all is the final encore, the second intermezzo from Brahms’ Op 117, in which every tiny nuance, every fleck of colour, seems perfectly placed.
