Given the warm reception accorded his 2009 Brahms B flat Concerto with Tadaaki Otaka and the NHK SO (7/18), it is perhaps surprising that Nelson Goerner has waited so long to record some of the solo music. Never a pianist to do things by half measures, he’s chosen arguably two of the most formidable works from Brahms’s relatively circumscribed solo oeuvre.

If ever there were a piano sonata with a symphony lurking inside, it is the Brahms F minor. To Goerner’s immense credit, he doesn’t detonate the instrument in an effort to accommodate the occasionally overblown writing but has mastered its details so thoroughly that, for all the breadth and heft of the musical ideas, the piece sounds proportionate to the piano.

The opening Allegro maestoso unfolds almost exclusively in chords – straight, arpeggiated, broken, embellished. Whether robust or quiet, Goerner gives them shape by sensitive voicing and unwavering attention to the larger phrase contours. Heroic and lyric passages are vividly contrasted, and Brahms’s plentiful expressive and agogic annotations scrupulously observed. Yet the signal moments in Goerner’s reading occur in the chaste Andante espressivo. Rather than yielding to the temptations of heaven-storming youthful ardour early on, he lets Brahms’s relatively thin textures speak with beguiling simplicity. This aura of touching tenderness allows space for amplification and expansion without overplaying in the movement’s passionate yet contained conclusion. Following an animated Scherzo and atmospheric Intermezzo, Goerner brings the finale’s diffuse elements into a cohesive, satisfying whole.

In Goerner’s hands the Paganini Variations, Brahms’s tribute to the virtuosity of his friend Carl Tausig, becomes an exploration of the piano’s expressive and sonorous potential. In Book 1 the treacherous right-hand octave glissandos of Var 13 are tossed off without ostentation, while the dazzling Var 14 fairly dances with delight. In Book 2, Var 8 brings to mind a danseur noble nonchalantly demonstrating the perfection of his fouettés. The quieter variations, such as Vars 12 and 13, exude intimacy and mystery. Perhaps the highest praise is that, far from being the arduous progress through an obstacle course that the Variations often seem, this performance is a seamless traversal of variegated terrain, effortlessly accomplished, emerging finally as a showcase for artistic finesse rather than technical display.

My sole reservation is a technical one: at times microphone placement seems unnecessarily close to the instrument. That said, this F minor Sonata is magisterial in purview and distinctive in its compelling musicality. I suspect that, with time, the Paganini Variations will take their place beside the best of them, Petri’s (APR, 12/15) and Richter’s (Decca) included.