Now that Angela Hewitt has concluded her Beethoven sonata cycle with two of its ‘biggest guns’, it appears that she has also saved her best for last, interpretatively speaking. She doesn’t approach the Hammerklavier’s opening Allegro with Beethoven’s controversially optimistic metronome marking in mind (nor does she play the first note as a quaver), yet her flexible and fluid exposition abounds with vitality and variety of articulation, plus spontaneous-sounding accents and points of emphasis. By contrast, Hewitt wields tighter rhythmic reins over the fughetta’s development section, conveying an altogether different character, as if her fingers had morphed into a woodwind ensemble. Hewitt’s own brilliant booklet essay offers cogent reasons for her choosing the A natural rather than the misprinted A sharp in the rising chains of broken fifths and sixths at bars 224 26 (I remain an unrepentant A sharp guy!).

Hewitt’s meticulously aligned phrase groupings in the Scherzo’s outer sections seem inhibited and studio-bound compared alongside the angular swagger of Steven Osborne’s earlier Hyperion traversal. Yet the ferocity of Hewitt’s upward scales and sardonic tremolo chords at the end of the Trio compensate. A heartfelt, sensitively nuanced Adagio sostenuto gorgeously showcases Hewitt’s refined finger legato technique. Like Murray Perahia, Hewitt trusts the silences between the Largo’s fragmentary gestures, although, unlike her older colleague, she paces the fugue conservatively. One readily perceives Hewitt’s linear cognisance and consistently uniform trills and turns, plus the fact that she does not get slower and thicker as the music gains complexity.

I suspect that Hewitt has lived longer with as well as within Op 111. She takes her time over the Maestoso introduction, where the descending suspensions in bars 11 15 evoke the gravitas and harmonic tension of Annie Fischer’s classic EMI recording. The Allegro proper sounds faster than it is actually played, due to Hewitt’s ability to follow each gnarly line through to its final destination, and without sweeping little details under the carpet, so to speak. The same goes for the Arietta variations’ carefully plotted tempo relationships, to say nothing of the pianist’s rapt concentration, hypnotic continuity and sustaining power. At 21 minutes, Hewitt’s Arietta is longer than most, yet there is not one slack or indulgent moment. Hewitt’s longtime producer Ludger Böckenhoff does full justice to both pianist and her resplendent new Fazioli grand.