Son Pno 14-16

At first reluctant to make recordings, by the 1930s the great pianist Artur Schnabel had fully accepted the new technology. His recordings of Beethoven’s piano music include all the numbered sonatas, originally issued on subscription by the Beethoven Sonata Society. This, the fifth volume of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas series, presents the famous Moonlight Sonata, which was no less a recital favourite in the 1930s than it is today. Writing in 1936, a critic of the New York Times noted that Schnabel’s interpretation was marked with a characteristic regard both for detail and the full sweep of the work, which "assumed a new vitality". In its August 1933 review of the recording of the Pastorale Sonata, Gramophone’s critic wrote of the transparency of Schnabel’s playing and of his unerring choice of tempi. In his insistence on recording all thirty-two Sonatas, Schnabel left a statement that influenced how we understand and appreciate many of Beethoven’s works.