The sound on this recording — 96kHz digital recording with Sony Super Bit Map mastering — is a thin hair away from an SACD in clarity and definition. Added to the magical skill of E. Alan Silver, one of the truly legendary great recording producers of our time, this is a recording to cherish purely for the sound. You will never come a lot closer to actually sitting next to a piano. Connoisseur Society recordings have been setting a critical standard for many decades, and it is exciting to see new recordings from them with all of the traditional quality, but also using the latest advances.

The early sonatas Mr. Wehr plays with a classical directness and transparency. It is only with Op. 57 that he begins to flail and shriek with the best of them, while never losing his control and clarity. While no pianist is or ever will be directly comparable to Wilhelm Kempff — and the tragedy for us is that Kempff needed an audience to really play to his limit, that is, his studio recordings never quite measured up — Wehr has certain qualities of technique and style in common with the great German master. Of course Kempff was a profoundly mystical man and had the genius of conveying that sense to us. Wehr does not convey mysticism, but solid musicianship, drama, and poetry. It is certainly telling that the only other recording by Wehr in my collection is the music of the “American Ravel,” impressionist Charles Tomlinson Griffes. He brings the same precision, grace and clarity to his Beethoven, something Beethoven surely needs and doesn’t often get.

The later sonatas in this set do not really tell us — nothing could — just how Mr. Wehr will play the very last sonatas, the ones Leschititsky advised his students never to play. Beethoven was mad when he wrote them and a pianist who tries to remain sane while playing them just may not make it — either he won’t bring them off, or he won’t be able to come back afterwards. The Waldstein Sonata, Op. 53, exactly halfway to the Hammerklavier, utilizes a few of the stylistic devices Beethoven will later amplify and use in the construction of his last works, and Mr. Wehr here plays this sonata exactly as he should, in view only of what has come before, not, as most pianists do, with full knowledge of what came after. Hence this is a rather tame Waldstein in comparison, but a beautiful and poetic Waldstein nonetheless.

-- Paul Shoemaker, MusicWeb International