**** BEETHOVEN: Sonatas and Bagatelles. Stephen Kovacevich,...

**** BEETHOVEN: Sonatas and Bagatelles. Stephen Kovacevich, piano. (EMI Classics)

This expatriate American pianist, for a long time one of the more promising keyboard musicians of his generation, continues to fulfill his promise. This Beethoven program brings Kovacevich’s acuity and stylishness to bear on works both unexpected and predictable. He probes deeply into the still center of the finale of Opus 109 and uncovers hidden details in the Opus 126 Bagatelles. But he also finds depths of feeling and unexpected humors in the sometimes innocuous Opus 26. And he makes the neglected two-movement works of Opus 49 sound as important as they are. In everything, he balances Beethoven’s dichotomies: in Opus 26, grace and precision; in Opus 109, violence and orderliness, the demonic and the intellectual; in Opus 49, formality and bumptiousness. In other words, the composer’s entire range.