Neefe: Complete Piano Sonatas; Beethoven: Nine Variations for Keyboard on a March by Dressler – review

The Bonn court organist Christian Gottlob Neefe (1748-98) was Beethoven's first important piano, organ and composition teacher, the young pupil writing: "If I ever become a great man yours shall be a share of the credit." Neefe gave him a theme by Ernst Christoph Dressler on which to compose variations and it became the 12-year-old Beethoven's first published work, showing early signs of the fertile imagination that was soon to take flight. Neefe's own sonatas, which straddled the baroque and classical eras, are mechanical and formulaic in comparison, and while Susan Kagan's playing is exemplary, these gentle, rather intimate pieces are better suited to the clavichord.