There has been a tendency during the Edinburgh International Festival to try to avoid writing weekly columns about things that are going on during that year’s festival. In a way that makes sense. It avoids overkill. It recognises that not everyone is interested in what’s going on out east. And it gives everybody who’s not interested in the festival a bit of variety.

But I do remember one year when a topic came up that was directly relevant to some event in the festival, and spending an inordinate amount of time trying to skirt around it and find another option. It’s good for all of us to have a bit of a break from things Edinburgh, or at least a bit of a change; but it seemed daft to sidestep a topic simply because it related to something that occurs in August and in the capital.

In the past fortnight I have spent a long time on the train which runs between the relative sanity of Queen Street and the wondrous lunacy of what lies beyond Murrayfield; and don’t get me started on the contemporary bedlam that can be the journey itself, especially the return leg, whether early evening or late night. It’s mayhem. Sardines in a tin have more space.

Never mind, I assured myself on Day One, August 8: you’ll have plenty time to think on the journey. And I had things that I wanted to chew over. I was keen to get some broad thinking around that Beethoven Sonatas series in the Playfair Library Hall, which started on opening day, is still running, has reached Concert 7, and has two more to go, on Tuesday and Wednesday.

I wondered about the enormity of getting such a massive project assembled, with 32 different Piano Sonatas, albeit by one man, arranged into groups to form an entity embracing one composer’s lifetime thoughts and efforts in a single musical genre. How do you do it? I suppose, crudely, you could run them chronologically which, literally, would give you a thread of continuity, though there would probably be some messy programmes en route.

Generally, a sound starting point or, rather, ending point, is to make sure you get the last three sonatas – opus 109, 110 and 111 together – into a single concert. These are the Holy Trinity of piano sonatas. There is nothing more transcendent in the repertoire than these three miracles of musical creation. I have seen people weep at them. I have done so myself.

Five years ago, when he was running Perth Concert Hall, Svend Brown, now artistic director of Glasgow Concert Halls, hit on a good approach when he devised a series to feature pianist Llyr Williams. As I recall, that was one of Williams’s first Beethoven series: now the Welshman is one of the top guns in that repertoire. For Perth in 2010, Brown created a broad narrative context to the structure of the series, entitling it A Life In Eight Chapters. That worked pretty well, with a roughly chronological flow of the Sonatas within it.

In his current Beethoven series in Glasgow, which resumes next month, Brown has been featuring both the Piano Sonatas, again with Llyr Williams, and Beethoven’s String Quartets, with the Elias String Quartet. Here, he’s adopted a different approach, with lots of talks and interviews with the artists, building a portrait of Beethoven, how he worked, thought and approached his mighty endeavours. And he’s structured it broadly, by adapting the famous “three periods” into which Beethoven’s music has historically been divided, the so-called “early, middle and late periods”. Brown has, more helpfully and accurately, retitled them as “The Young Beethoven”, “The Years of Maturity” and, as ever, “Late Beethoven”.

He’s also added, in the context of his autumn weekend survey of The Piano, a powerful element in the form of an all-Beethoven recital with John Lill, perhaps the greatest Beethoven pianist of our time. Lill will be in minor-ish mode, playing the Pathetique, Appassionata and Moonlight Sonatas, along with the final opus 111 Sonata, which begins in a dramatic C minor, and shifts, transcendently, into the major key for its finale.

Rudolf Buchbinder’s current Edinburgh International Festival series in the Playfair Library Hall has been the subject of much discussion, and my own ambiguities have been explicit in the reviews. I have, however, been rather taken with Buchbinder’s mix ‘n’ match planning, which has brought together some enlightening combinations of Sonatas, most memorably his bringing into the same programme the tiny, two-movement, 15-minute opus 90 Sonata and the steamroller Hammerklavier Sonata: unlikely, perhaps, but it worked to phenomenal effect. And we will hear next week how he ends it all.