Boris Giltburg has launched a new website, www.beethoven32.com, to host his project for Beethoven Year that will see the pianist learn and perform all 32 piano sonatas at regular intervals during 2020.
Not content with just one challenge for Beethoven Year, the Moscow-born Israeli pianist is also recording the complete Beethoven piano concertos with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko, again for Naxos. Giltburg will also perform all five concertos with the Brussels Philharmonic under Thierry Fischer in February as part of the Flagey Piano Festival.
The 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth next year has prompted Giltburg to tackle all 32 sonatas in chronological order; he has only played nine of them before.
Starting in January, each sonata will be filmed and shared on Giltburg’s YouTube channel. Supplementary material documenting his journey of discovery will be posted on his bespoke ‘Beethoven 32’ website, as a means of sharing with audiences, via written and video material, the daily challenges and obstacles in learning these pinnacles of the piano repertoire across such a short period of time.
Beethoven composed the sonatas over nearly 30 years between 1795 and 1822. By choosing to learn and film them in the order that they were written, Giltburg hopes to honour the composer’s remarkable trajectory.