Leif Ove Andsnes enjoys the admiration of audiences and critics around the world. The New York Times has described him as ‘a pianist of magisterial elegance, power and insight’, while The Wall Street Journal has hailed him as ‘one of the most gifted musicians of his generation’. Among the Norwegian pianist's most significant achievements is The Beethoven Journey, a project in which he performed Beethoven's piano concertos with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra more than 200 times. He has received numerous Gramophone Awards and has been nominated for a Grammy Award eleven times.
The pianist’s discography comprises more than fifty albums, and his insightful interpretations of Beethoven's music have earned particular acclaim. This makes a recital devoted to the composer's final three piano sonatas especially compelling. Together they form a world of their own – inward-looking, seemingly created for private contemplation. Although Beethoven's predecessors, as well as the composer himself, had established a set of conventional principles governing the sonata form, in the trilogy of Sonatas, Opp. 109–111, the last of the Viennese Classics abandoned that model in favour of a freer approach to musical form and its details. He brought the spiritual dimension of sound to the fore, and the sublime concluding Arietta of the Sonata, Op. 111 symbolically completes his reformist vision of the genre. These works may therefore be regarded as the testament of a visionary who chose silence over virtuoso display: a deaf composer who lost contact with the world of sound, yet gained absolute freedom – from the conventions and rules he himself had once shaped.
Piotr Maculewicz