Pianist Andras Schiff doesn't do things by halves. In his latest all-Beethoven recital, part of a complete cycle of sonatas that he is compiling with painstaking care, he used not one but two pianos: a dark-hued Bösendorfer for the fantasy of the three sonatas Op 31, and a bright-toned Steinway for the Waldstein Sonata. For most pianists, such extravagance would smack of preciousness, but with Schiff, it's all part of a magnificently complete approach to these pieces.

There is no sense in his playing of taking things for granted. In the Op 31 sonatas, there were moments of startling revelation, not least because Schiff played all three together. They came across as experimental pieces in which Beethoven tries out a dizzying variety of styles, forms and languages. Schiff gave the opening G major sonata an improvisatory abandon, above all in the throwaway ending of the first movement and the superabundant ornamentation in the slow movement, which sounded like an impossibly florid operatic aria.

But it was the second piece, the D minor Tempest Sonata, where Schiff came into his own. In the middle of the first movement, the mysterious, slow chords that opened the piece returned and threatened to becalm the whole structure. Schiff relished this weird harmonic limbo, a vision of a poetic world that seemed to exist outside the rest of the piece. It was an expressive ambiguity that he sustained throughout the sonata: in the dreamlike song of the slow movement and the flow of the finale, which ended with a pianissimo gesture, as if in the middle of a phrase.

In the Waldstein Sonata, Beethoven finds a whole new structure, telescoping three movements into a two-part work. It was a brave new world that Schiff created with brilliant insight in the energetic drama of the first movement and the dazzling imagination of the second.