{TABLE} Sonata in E flat op 7 .................. Beethoven Sonata in G op 31 No 1 ................. Beethoven Sonata in E minor Op 90 ................ Beethoven Sonata in C minor Op 13 (Pathetique) ... Beethoven {/TABLE} THE US pianist Robert Taub is currently engaged on an exploration of the Beethoven piano sonatas, both in concert and in the recording studio. He's giving the concerts in his native country and also in Galway, where the second annual series of three recitals began on Saturday.

The strangeness of Taub's view of Beethoven took me by surprise last year, and he managed to pull off the same trick all over again last weekend. Taub's style - whether this is what he intends or not - comes across very much in the play as you please mould.

On Saturday, this applied across the board, through fluctuations of tempo, failure to pay due attention to rests, arbitrary changes of dynamics, even to the very notes themselves; whether this last stemmed from lack of preparation or loss of memory, or was some sort of price being paid for the ultimate degree of interpretative spontaneity was hard to tell.

The gapped tooth aspect of Taub's playing presented itself early on in the first sonata on the programme, the all too rarely heard Op. 7; and, even at the other extreme, in the Pathetique, there were seriously unsettling discontinuities in the straightforward reproduction of the notes.

Even when note accuracy was not an issue, Taub tended to force the pace and pressure the music with expressionistic burdens he was unable to make it bear. The best regulated playing and music making came in the short Sonata in E minor where the songfulness of the second movement proved obvious enough for even as contrary a Beethoven interpreter as Taub to pick it up.