Maurizio Pollini began to record his cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas for Deutsche Grammophon in 1975, and he's only now nearing its completion. This collection of early works is the penultimate instalment; like most of its predecessors, they are studio recordings made in Lucerne and Munich last year, and like many of Pollini's recent discs and live performances, a curious mix of the magisterial and the severe. The two tendencies co-exist in the biggest of the sonatas here, the E flat Op 7, where passages of fabulous clarity and poise are punctuated with explosive chords that seem out of scale in early Beethoven, while parts of Op 22 in B flat are curiously abrupt too. But sometimes the overbearing element can vanish altogether, as it does in Pollini's delicate, quicksilver account of the first of the Op 14 pair, in G major. No one who has followed this cycle will think twice about hearing this latest batch of performances; those who might want to explore Beethoven sonatas for the first time should look elsewhere.