I was excited to hear in the autumn of 2025 that Mitsuko Uchida had returned to Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas in recital 20 years or so after her memorable recordings on Philips. An excitement intensified when Decca announced the release of the performances she gave at Suntory Hall. The recording is everything one could hope for. There’s no discernible audience noise but you’re very conscious that these are live performances. The principal reason for that awareness is how Uchida plays. All of her tempi are more expansive than in her earlier recordings, although none excessively so. These are not lugubriously contemplative interpretations. Rather, it’s as if in the live environment Uchida has felt able to bestow more spaciousness on her conception and the attendant freedom and flexibility add a wholly fascinating dimension.

One aspect of this new approach is spontaneity. Uchida reminds us how so much of the music in the last three sonatas has an improvisatory quality to it. The opening right-hand/left-hand dialogue in Op. 109 for example sounds delightfully as if Beethoven wasn’t sure how he was going to conclude it when he started. Even more strikingly, in the first movement of Op. 110 I had a keener sense than ever before of Beethoven working out in real time where he was going with the cantabile material. There are also interesting formal consequences with these slightly looser approaches. For example, although Uchida’s contrapuntal playing is immaculate, I’ve never been less conscious of the structural dimensions of the fugue that is the last movement of Op. 110. Where in the fine recording by Paul Wee I reviewed recently you feel there’s an intellectual and musical inexorability about it, Uchida’s reading has a novel sense of exploration and discovery, which I found thrilling.

Further discoveries abound: taken at a slightly slower speed, the Andante theme of the variations which form the last movement of Op. 109 instantly reveals a kinship with the third movement Adagio of Op. 110 and the opening of the second movement of Op. 111. Still recognisably an Andante, there’s a chorale-like luminosity to Uchida’s playing which also inhabits the slow music of the other two sonatas, manifesting something profoundly spiritual. The opening movement of Op. 111 here is again a little broader than the Philips recordings, but the sense of unease and instability, almost of menace, is overwhelming. Her playing of the second movement is revelatory. She gives herself more room and within that constructs a compelling argument. Writing about Wee, I felt that he played this movement as though he agreed with Thomas Mann’s Kretzschmar that this was the end of the sonata ‘without any return’. In Uchida’s performance, with its variety of colours and subtly highlighted idioms one hears it as the gateway to future music. She parses Beethoven’s staggering visions, setting out what feels like infinite possibilities, whilst at the same time surfacing the valedictory. It’s stupendous playing.

In between Uchida’s two recordings came the publication by Bärenreiter in 2019-22 of the Urtext edition of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas. The booklet tells us that this was the edition used for these performances. Uchida’s concern with sources and textual scholarship has been long standing. In a fascinating lecture at the British Library in the early 2000s she talked about how a composition travels from a composer’s mind to the printed page and how errors creep in at every stage — the composer miswriting, the copyist making mistakes, not to mention publisher and editorial interference. Notably she recounted being given, to her delight, a facsimile of Op. 111, looking inside at random, and taking half a minute to realise she was holding the score upside-down. Jonathan Del Mar’s superb work for Bärenreiter means that virtually every textual question one could have about the sonatas (many of which were ‘live’ at the time Uchida gave her lecture) have been, if not answered, then coherently collated, so that the performer can make informed decisions. Is that a G sharp or an F sharp in the left hand at bar 182 of the third movement of Op. 109 for example? Do you play the first trill marked in bar 25 of the first movement of Op. 110 – it’s only marked in two of the sources? Ditto the first sforzando in bar 3 of the first movement of Op. 111, inadvertently or deliberately omitted from one of the key texts? One can be sure that Uchida will have pondered all of the many issues raised. I don’t know whether the Urtext publication was one of the reasons she decided to return to these works but the intellectual catalyst it provides even to the amateur pianist is rich indeed and one can only be grateful for the way it seems to have informed these readings.

This has been an unusually rich few months for Beethoven recordings. As well as Paul Wee, I’ve enjoyed recent releases from Jonathan Biss and Cédric Tiberghien. But even in this exalted company Uchida’s traversal strikes me as very special indeed.