Don’t expect the tame and usual from the Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam. Don’t even expect well-behaved hair. This is the king of that strange period beast, the fortepiano; and his invigorating cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas on the Swedish label BIS (five discs released, 12 more to go) have made numerous listeners reassess their feelings about the short-breathed jangle of the fortepiano sound.

Now that he’s launching a Beethoven concerto series in parallel, you’d think he’d stick with his fortepiano friend. Not so. Always unpredictable, Brautigam has chosen to use a modern instrument, a Steinway D concert grand, though generally played in the fortepiano manner, with a crisp attack, brittle articulation and no lingering clouds of resonance. In these studio recordings the piano was placed with the lid removed in the middle of the orchestra (the excellent Norköpping Symphony Orchestra, from the former textile town once known as the Manchester of Sweden). The conductor, to make matters merrier, is Andrew Parrott, a period-instrument man originally, founder of the Taverner Consort, Choir and Players.

This is a recording set-up with consequences. Out the window goes the romantic 19th-century notion of the concerto as a titanic conflict between soloist and orchestra. In come intimate performances, styled almost as chamber music. In an early, Mozartean concerto like the C major, Op 15 (the first to be published, but not the first written), this scale of delivery is ideal. Brautigam’s fingering is so agile and clear that he makes you tingle in arpeggio runs; he’s equally splendid capering about, lightweight and giggly, in the rondo finale.

The third concerto, in C minor, Op 37, moves farther away from the Mozart template toward Beethoven’s kingdom of storm and stress. Brautigam certainly knows how to be fiery (he remarks in the CD notes how his years with the sonatas have made him more fluent at “speaking Beethoven”). Yet he still avoids heavy rhetoric, giving us crispness rather than weight, engaging in dialogue with the orchestra rather than plunging into noisy battle.

If you want the blunt power of the old mighty Russians, Brautigam is probably not your pianist. But there’s fierce clarity here, and musical refreshment of a high order. Why not succumb?

(BIS, TMS £12.99, call 0845 6026328)

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