Maurizio Pollini, who turned 80 between the recording sessions for his latest album, here probes the inner struggles and ever-changing psychology of two of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas. Having taken almost 40 years to record all 32 of the composer’s piano sonatas, he re-recorded the final three to mark the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth in 2020. The temptation to add a second take on the two remaining late sonatas proved irresistible and led Pollini to return to Munich’s Herkulessaal, his favourite recording venue, to set down his fully seasoned readings of the Piano Sonata No. 28 in A Major, Op. 101 and the Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-Flat Major, Op. 106, the “Hammerklavier”. The great Italian artist’s vision of the short yet intense Op. 101 and the monumental “Hammerklavier” has deepened since he first recorded them in the mid-1970s. Pollini’s interpretations are more volatile, more edgy but no less assured in terms of his technical control and command of the music’s formal logic. It’s a combination that serves to signal the timeless nature, or perhaps permanent modernity, of works written in the late 1810s. Something miraculous happens in the “Hammerklavier”, as Beethoven and Pollini strive to hold infinity in their grasp. It begins with the pianist accepting the challenge of the composer’s near-impossible metronome marking and risking all as he wrings out every drop of the music’s turbulent emotions. The heroic drama of the first movement and the unsettling energy of its short successor give way to playing of transcendent beauty in the “Adagio sostenuto”, clearly the outcome of one extraordinary take, made all the more moving by background traces of Pollini’s spontaneous singing. What follows in the finale sounds like the outward expression of a private communion with the spirit of Beethoven, still restless, still searching for ultimate truth, still making superhuman demands on his performers.