In Sydney for three concerts and a recital, we caught up with one smart, literate and very, very musical Beethoven scholar and pedagogue.

For your Sydney recital you are playing four Beethoven sonatas. You range from the very gentle Pastorale, up to the hyper-romantic Waldstein. Are there particular challenges to encompassing that breadth of repertoire?

I think one reason that an all Beethoven program works, whereas a program of the music of almost any other composer is problematic, is that Beethoven’s music is so unbelievably diverse. I find that just working through the 32 sonatas. Having played 19 of them you think it would become easier to work on number 20 but it really doesn’t. You start at zero with each of them. That’s a difficulty in the context of a recital, but it’s also the pleasure of the work.

I’ve played this program a few times now, and it is an amazing thing to go from the Pastorale, which has an almost placid quality, to opus 32 number 1, which is so rambunctious in a way, and then ending with the Waldstein which is so heaven storming. I mean it’s a cliché about Beethoven that he addresses everything, but it’s...