Harmonia Mundi must like Beethoven’s piano sonatas. As if Paul Lewis’s complete cycle wasn’t enough, the label now presents Javier Perianes in four sonatas ending with a moto perpetuo movement, hence the disc’s title. In contrast to Lewis’s tightly integrated tempo relationships in the Op 26 Sonata’s first-movement variations, Perianes is expansive to a fault, especially in the way he pulls about the minore variation, causing the syncopations between hands to dissipate. Conversely, Perianes’s Scherzo is much closer to Beethoven’s Allegro molto than Lewis’s relatively sedate reading, although Angela Hewitt’s recent Hyperion recording scores for its superior dynamic range, biting accents and more dramatic transitions between sections. While the third movement’s march rhythms are less incisively pointed than, say, Murray Perahia’s, Perianes’s relaxed basic tempo for the finale (nearly 50 per cent longer than the duration of Richter’s breathless sprint) yields intriguing cross-rhythmic interplay and truly explosive climaxes.

Perianes sets an appropriately veiled mood in the Tempest Sonata’s first-movement introduction and throughout the Adagio but elsewhere rounds out the music’s angular edges and dramatic surges. Op 54’s opening minuet is relaxed and graceful, although one can take issue with Perianes’s over-loud octaves and inconsistent handling of rests. He takes the moto perpetuo second movement at a true Allegretto in a lower-voltage approximation of Schiff’s similarly paced yet more interestingly detailed traversal. The tempo fluctuations Perianes employs over the Op 90 Sonata’s course ebb and flow without sounding mannered. By the same token, comparable lyricism and subtleties of touch can be conveyed with stricter attention to Beethoven’s tempo indications, as borne out in classic recordings by Solomon and Ivan Moravec. Harmonia Mundi’s spacious (albeit slightly murky) sound approaches concert-hall realism.