Like any artform, music is about discovering existing relationships and forging new ones. Víkingur Ólafsson’s restless, imaginative approach to programming, particularly when the works of primarily two composers – Chopin and Bach or Debussy and Rameau, for example – are juxtaposed, ensures both kinds of relationships are addressed. The results are never less than revelatory.

Ólafsson’s latest release is no exception. Here, he dwells on the connections between the music of JS Bach and Beethoven – and, thanks to “a faint memory from my teenage music school days in Reykjavík,” those between Beethoven and Schubert, specifically between the former’s Sonata No. 27 in E minor Op. 90 and the latter’s Piano Sonata in E minor D566.

The work which gives the album its title is however Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30 in E minor Op. 109, whose final movement, a “grand, awe-inspiring” set of variations, feels to Ólafsson “like a deeply felt homage to the Goldberg Variations.” Here, we find the true inspiration for this album: after spending a year performing little more than the Goldbergs, Ólafsson was, for his...