At first reluctant to make recordings, by the 1930s, at the age of fifty, the great pianist Artur Schnabel finally consented to record Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, the first complete cycle on disc. After the sonatas, Schnabel produced recordings of selected variations and other pieces. This tenth release in the Naxos Complete Beethoven Sonata Society Recordings includes works intended both for amateurs and professional pianists. Writing in the February 1939 issue of The Gramophone, Alec Robertson noted that the pianist’s ‘fine musicianship has rarely been so triumphantly displayed as in this album. Beethoven in furious mood is evidently congenial to him, but at the other end of the scale is his tender and amazingly apt handling of the little early Rondo’. Schnabel’s set of Beethoven recordings became a classic almost immediately and the yardstick by which all others would be measured.