THE PROJECT
In Beethoven’s musical universe, the piano sonatas stand at the center. They are not only a laboratory for his ideas, but they also mirror his life—from the influence of Haydn and Mozart to his personal struggles and passions—revealing a deeply personal voice that continues to resonate more than 200 years later.
When I was six, I often listened to a CD of Beethoven’s “great sonatas,” which included the Pathétique, Moonlight, Waldstein, and Appassionata. For quite some time I believed that Ludwig van Beethoven had written only four piano sonatas. My doubts appeared a couple of years later, when my teacher asked me to learn the first movement of the Sonata in G major, No. 25, Op. 79, and I discovered with great excitement that there are, in fact, thirty-two of them.
Since then, Beethoven’s sonatas have been a constant source of inspiration, and they appear frequently in my concert programs. Beethoven is one of the most demanding, yet most rewarding, composers. His music has an astonishing ability to occupy almost every corner of the mind while learning it, yet it always pulses with energy and a rich palette of emotions during performance— from the drama of the Pathétique to the serene immersion in nature of the Pastoral Sonata.
Beethoven’s music is always oriented toward the future and often decades ahead of its time
Beyond the emotional experience for me as a performer or listener, Beethoven used the sonatas as his “laboratory,” where he experimented with form and enriched it with polyphonic elements, complex rhythmic structures, and a harmonic language that often extends astonishingly far into the musical world of the twentieth century. Beethoven’s music is always oriented toward the future and often decades ahead of its time — which, in my opinion, brings it close to the mindset of contemporary composers, who continually seek to push the boundaries of what has already been said.
Last year I studied Beethoven’s sonata Les Adieux for the Davos Festival, where it was performed alongside contemporary music. Immersing myself once again in Beethoven’s world and its many musical challenges, I felt a renewed sense of enthusiasm for this music — and for the fascinating dialogue between Beethoven’s still visionary art and the music of the twenty-first century.
This experience gradually led me to a series of questions:
What does Beethoven mean to composers of our time?
Which ideas in his music-and particularly in the sonatas-might inspire them to create new works for piano today?
How can these connections be explored?
Out of these reflections, the idea for a new project grew: Not only to study and perform all thirty-two sonatas, but also to invite contemporary composers to respond to each sonata with a short piece — whether as prologues, epilogues, commentaries, or from a completely different perspective. In this way, the project would not only become an exploration of this musical monument, but also a living dialogue between it and the music of our time.
Working on this project is profoundly inspiring, and I feel very fortunate to have Thomas Larcher, Ben Nobuto, and Morris Wolf among the first composers contributing to it.
I look forward to sharing more details with you soon.
Sergey Tanin