Mastering one Beethoven sonata is a feat even for an accomplished musician, but one local pianist has accepted the challenge to master all 32 of them.
The Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center selected Gilles Vonsattel, who teaches piano at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, to learn and perform all 32 of Beethoven’s sonatas — 11 hours of music — within one year.
“It’s incredibly intense,” Vonsattel said. “It’s one of the most demanding things you can do, because you could honestly spend a year on a couple of these sonatas and try to play them really well, so to do all 32 of them is a lot. The real reason to do it is to experience his evolution as a composer, which is one of the great stories of human imagination.”
He will also be performing and lecturing about the sonatas elsewhere, including UMass, Amherst College’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and two venues in California, during and beyond that timeframe.
Vonsattel performs about half of the sonatas entirely from memory, with no sheet music, getting up at 5 a.m. to practice. Other people might see his rigorous schedule as a big deal, and he appreciates that the school highlights it for the sake of motivating students, but for Vonsattel, that’s just the way of commitment: “We are all surrounded by people who get up at 5 and do a lot of stuff,” he said. “My building super works really hard and does some pretty great stuff for people.”
After all that practice, naturally, the music “gets wired into your brain,” he said, but “it’s all a balancing act. I can’t literally do only this, but I’m in the zone.”
Vonsattel first started playing piano as a child. His parents are both musicians; his dad was a well-known accordion player in Switzerland, and his mom, a French teacher, also played piano. He loved playing the piano and did so for musicals at school, but he also played soccer and spent a lot of time on his academics. “My piano teachers, I think, were always like, ‘Really, you could be practicing more,'” he said.
He dabbled in jazz and briefly played the violin, as well. Still, it was classical piano music that stuck.
“You can play lots of voices” on the piano, he said. “It feels like you’re conducting your own ensemble, and you bring people in, and you’re telling people, ‘Be quiet, bring this voice in’ – it feels incredible to control that.”
The repertoire written for the instrument is “one of the most extraordinary treasures we have in music,” he said.
Beethoven’s music, in particular, has staying power because of its approachability.
“You really don’t need to know anything about music to get something powerful out of it, and that’s because of the inherent drama in the music,” Vonsattel said. “There’s that hook, but then it rewards endless exploration [and] investigation because of the genius and the care with which he approaches art, so you can dive into it pretty easily.”
Of course, just because the sonatas are engaging to listen to doesn’t mean they’re easy to play, and Vonsattel said the complexity makes each one rewarding.
“I think it’s fair to say Beethoven loved challenging pianists, so he loved writing things deliberately that would make people sound bad, to be like, ‘What can you do with this?’” he said.
When the Gazette visited Vonsattel’s office on Thursday, Sept. 10, he played two pieces: Sonata No. 8 in C minor,” also called the “Pathétique”; and “Piano Sonata No. 29 in B♭ major,” also known as the “Hammerklavier,” his favorite of the sonatas.
He was getting ready to perform the “Hammerklavier” as part of a show in California the following week. The piece is “one of the hardest things, still, anyone’s ever written for my instrument,” he said.
His upcoming calendar also includes shows closer to home – four free concerts each semester at Bezanson Recital Hall at UMass, each of which will feature different sonatas. Those concerts are free to attend, but guests should arrive early.
“Beethoven’s creations are not like others’,” Vonsattel said. “They are treasures that have been left to us. … It’s awesome to watch someone experience that for the first time and be exposed to that – and I think that’s my job.”
For more information about Gilles Vonsattel, visit gillesvonsattel.com. For a lineup of his upcoming shows and lectures at UMass, visit umass.edu/music-dance/events?keyword=Vonsattel. For a lineup of his shows at Lincoln Center, visit chambermusicsociety.org/our-concerts/at-lincoln-center/beethoven-piano-sonatas.
