Beethoven: The Last Three Piano Sonatas, Opp. 109, 110 & 111

Recorded in Tokyo before an utterly quiet, spellbound audience, the performances display the virtues expected from such a sensitive and gracious musician who never once shows off but simply places her art at Beethoven’s service. The demands in sonatas 30-32 are considerable, including severe emotional changes and other structural peculiarities from a composer testing the boundaries of what a piano sonata in the early 1820s could do.

Uchida’s Beethoven remains unassumingly wonderful. The contrasts between loud and soft can be dramatic but are never shocking; the quiet passages offer a kind of communion. The long finales of these sonatas emerge in huge, world-encompassing spans, naturally and organically, but to powerful effect: when in the final movement of Op 110, the solemn, Bach-like fugal theme – with all its almost ecclesiastical certainty – dissolves into Beethoven at his most mysterious, only to return joyfully renewed, the result is profoundly affirmative. There’s no signposting of interpretation, no sense that this music needs a mediator. Instead, it’s as if she is turning over leaf after leaf of the music, and simply handing us what she finds there: from Beethoven, through Uchida, to us.