★★★★★

When I hear Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam play Beethoven on period fortepianos I think that, quite honestly, performing the great man’s music on a modern grand piano is an aesthetic crime of some magnitude – right up there with colourised Laurel & Hardy films and microwaving chicken.

Elsewhere in this issue, it’s true, I lavish praise on the fourth instalment of Jonathan Biss’s ongoing cycle of Beethoven Piano Sonatas, praise that is sincere and unquestionably deserved. But Brautigam’s attention to historical form is such that three separate fortepianos have been recalled from the subs’ benches in order to trace the evolution of the instrumental hardware with which Beethoven himself necessarily wrestled. Paul McNulty’s copy of an 1802 fortepiano serves Sonatas 1 through 18, its timbral delicacies and coarse-grained tuning temperament representing a complete game changer.

Take, for example, the Moonlight, Beethoven’s most used and abused sonata, lacquered often with cod-Romantic rubato. In Brautigam’s hands we’re reconnected with its eerie oddities – when...