At first reluctant to make recordings, by the 1930s the great pianist Artur Schnabel 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 second volume of the Beethoven Piano Sonata series, presents five of the early Sonatas, still in the sound world of Haydn but rich with Beethoven’s characteristic musical fingerprints that were to become abundant in his later compositions. In keeping with this, Schnabel’s legendary performances remain stylistically in tune with the late eighteenth century while at the same time looking forward to the romanticism and self-expression of the nineteenth century, a testimony to the originality and profound musicality of his interpretations.