Some recoupling of Gilels's distinguished library of Beethoven piano sonata recordings was, I suppose, inevitable when CD reissues were being contemplated, even though he himself was particularly interested in playing and recording certain sonatas—e.g. Les adieux with Opp. 79 and 90—in carefully selected groups. As it is, we have here five named sonatas. The second disc couples the Waldstein, the Appassionata, and Les adieux, and immediately establishes a claim to being one of the most desirable of all Beethoven piano sonata collections yet to be released on CD.
Max Harrison was less impressed than the majority of writers with Gilels's performance of the Waldstein. He thought it an ''interesting corpse'' of a performance. Perhaps there is something rather chilly and understated about Gilels's reading of the sonata's brief slow movement (by contrast, his playing of the slow movement of Les adieux is ravishing) but Beethoven must take some of the blame here, too. Schnabel used to make a lot of this movement, and Arrau does as well, but—tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon—Arrau would rather play the original movement, the Andante favori, if Beethoven's second thoughts on the matter were not by now so unhesitatingly accepted as the definitive ones. Throughout these three sonatas Gilels plays the music with an architect's sense of structure, great technical brilliance, and that uncanny blend of intellectual attack and intellectual distance which give his recordings of works like the Appassionata, and the Hammerklavier Sonata (CD 410 527-2GH, 2/84) their peculiar force and distinction.
Gilels's account of the so-called Tempest Sonata is also daunting in its intellectual control, not least in the finale. This is not a reading which is consciously daemonic, fluid or exquisitely 'painted', the tensions eerily depressed. With Gilels the issues are brought out into the open, identified, and worked out with great rigour. The coupling, by contrast, is not to be recommended. The Pastoral Sonata, stern and unsmiling in Gilels's hands, needs a more pliant and gracious touch. There is an imaginative failure here which a pianist like Kempff would never countenance.
The digital transfers are brilliant and true. The opening of Les adieux sounds a trifle muted and there is some tape background, but the ear dismisses this as rapidly as, initially, it picks it up.'