I have never heard of the TwoPianists label, but I like it. This is Beethoven performed, the notes explain, in a style “incorporating Carl Czerny’s insights on performing Beethoven’s music.” Every music student knows the name of Beethoven’s pupil Czerny—you grow up playing his entertaining, tuneful little exercises. It would take pages to describe what following Czerny’s directions does to the music, so let’s just say it involves stripping away falsehoods propagated by Beethoven’s hanger-on Anton Schindler. And that, judging from this performance, it makes the music vigorous and lively. This is gutsy, entertaining Beethoven—whatever directions the musicians are following, they must be doing something right. The cello is rich and passionate and the piano, especially, rings out with authority and excitement.

Peter Martens delivers brilliantly incisive and spirited accounts of all these works and makes a particularly good case for the cello arrangement of the Horn Sonata op. 17.