Beethoven: The Last Three Sonatas/Mitsuko Uchida album review – the music emerges as if new

Mitsuko Uchida has released a new live recording of Beethoven's final three piano sonatas, captured at Suntory Hall in Tokyo last October, twenty years after her benchmark studio recording of the same works. The Guardian's review finds it a worthy companion rather than a radical reinterpretation, praising the sense that decades of familiarity have not dulled the music's freshness or made it feel predetermined, and noting the recording's significance as a return to repertoire she has long been associated with.

The review highlights subtle differences from her earlier studio version, including a broader, more elastic approach and less urgency in the short second movements of Op 109 and 110, alongside audience-noise editing that preserves the atmosphere of collective concentration from the roughly 2,000-seat venue. It also notes the performance varied from one she gave at London's Wigmore Hall two weeks earlier, and singles out the finale of Op 110 — where a solemn, Bach-like fugue dissolves into mystery before a joyful return — as a highlight, describing her interpretation overall as unassuming, dramatic without shock, and "profoundly affirmative".