Credit: Marco Borggreve
Camerata Pacific under Artistic Director Adrian Spence is an ensemble known for innovative programs that feature top-notch resident artists who mix it up with chamber music and solo repertoire at four classy venues in Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. For thirty-six seasons Camerata Pacifica continues to present concerts that contain the traditional, esoteric and premieres of composers such as Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Pӓrt, Schoenberg, Ravel and Auerbach. The 2025-2026 season begins in October with a special offering - the Beethoven 32 project, of which Camerata Pacifica resident pianist Gilles Vonsattel will perform this composer’s complete piano sonatas over a three-year period.
In gearing up for the Beethoven 32 project, Vonsattel says, “It is fascinating to think about how these sonatas were performed in Beethoven’s era and their subsequent evolution in the public sphere as they became works of reference in the Western canon, regularly performed and recorded across the world on mostly modern pianos.” Beethoven wrote these sonatas from 1795-1822 on fortepianos that were constantly being tweaked with upgrades, often proposed by Beethoven. These works have it all: expressivity, technical demands, drama and as such, pianists continue to mull over certain interpretative issues like tempo, pedaling, and historic performance when using a fortepiano or modern grand.
The ancestral fortepiano was manufactured by prestigious companies like Broadwood, Streicher, Graf and Pleyel yet largely snubbed by pianists nowadays due to inherent structural limitations. Vonsattel has a different perspective about the significance of these instruments. “I have had the pleasure of performing several sonatas such as the Moonlight, Les Adieux and Hammerklavier on fortepianos. The experience was illuminating and essential. The immediate and striking sonic differences were the distinctive timbre of each harmonic area, the necessity of a more legato, expressive approach to passagework and the superior clarity of voicing, particularly the bass lines. I certainly don’t want to try to pretend I am playing a fortepiano when I play a modern piano, but these essential lessons help create more nuanced performances.”
What makes Beethoven’s pianos sonatas even more remarkable is that this composer’s profound hearing loss started to appear around the time he was writing the so-called Moonlight, Tempest, Waldstein and Appassionata sonatas. Although individual sonatas are often included on programs, only a select few have performed or recorded all thirty-two - so a shout-out to old school and currents like Claudio Arrau, Wilhelm Kempff, Friedrich Gilda, Maurizio Pollini, Richard Goode, Daniel Barenboim, András Schiff, Igor Levit and Gilles Vonsattel.
Vonsattel’s versatile artistry is reflected in recent concerts at Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival where he played some Beethoven piano sonatas as well as Enescu’s Sonata Op. 25 for violin and piano. His global career began in Switzerland, transitioned to The Juilliard School where he received a Master’s degree and flourished with top prizes at the Walter W. Naumburg International Piano Competition and Geneva International Music Competition. In addition to his Beethoven 32 project for Camerata Pacifica, he will also perform the cycle during the 2026-2027 season for Music@Menlo and Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. During offstage moments, Vonsattel is a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Camerata Pacifica’s season opening October/November concerts will include Beethoven’s monumental so-called Hammerklavier sonata Op. 106 of which the composer presumably told his publisher Artaria that the piece would give pianists a fist full for fifty years. This work starts off like a successful SpaceX starship launch and carries with it a soundworld of cosmic vibes and finger twisting swoosh. “It was entirely the idea of Adrian Spence to start the cycle with the tectonic statement that is Op. 106. I love the subversion of beginning the cycle with a work that is a culmination of Beethoven’s development of his musical language, as well as one that makes no concessions to anyone, audience or performer.” It has been reported that Franz Liszt was the first to perform this sonata for an audience in 1836, nineteen years after it was written - all the more reason to hear Vonsattel dive into the mysteries of a work that is still not widely performed.
Vonsattel offers insight about Beethoven’s compositional mindset as well as listening tips. “Beethoven’s late sonatas such as Op. 109, Op. 110 and Op. 111 end with notes of completion and resolution. Op. 106 is an elemental statement of compositional power and craft, though within there lies a slow movement of devastating and transcendent beauty. To start with Op. 106 poses an implied question: how did we get to this wild piece of music? It’s akin to beginning a movie at its most bewildering, active scene. To this day, some in the audience will be repelled by the immensity and the roughness of the music and will be glad the piece is done. Others will be perplexed and some hooked. It is a piece that requires familiarity for appreciation.”
Beethoven’s music remains the gold standard for classical and crossover artists like Jon Batiste, of whom inspired his Beethoven Blues album (2024). The Beethoven 32 project gives listeners an opportunity to hear Vonsattel bring to light this composer’s melodicism and contrapuntal wizardry found in sonatas like the Adagio cantabile of Op. 13 (Pathétique), fugues of Op. 106 and Op. 110 and sassy metric twists in the Arioso L’istesso section of Op. 111. Vonsattel explains why Beethoven’s last piano sonata, number 32 is so innovative and relevant.
“The question is a big one, and you come at it from this phenomenon of Beethoven suddenly writing something that sounds like boogie-woogie, by following a procedure of writing incrementally faster triplet rhythmic patterns in a variation set. Beethoven’s process of spawning works from the smallest of musical ideas means that there is always a rigorous musical logic to follow, wedded to his extremely idiosyncratic and inimitable personality that so strongly stamps the music. In the case of Op. 111, he followed his procedure to its very limit, not hesitating to explore strange outcomes – including happening to compose music that sounds like something from the future.”
Beethoven was a trendsetting composer who liked to push the boundaries of conventionalism in both his musical and personal life, of which the saying ’I did it my way’ seems an appropriate label. So, what is it about Beethoven’s music that has stood the test of time and makes it still relevant today? “There are so many ways to think about this question, but I will propose the following. Beethoven is an impossible contradiction. Profoundly original and often eccentric he is the polar opposite of creativity by Artificial Intelligence by imitation and rapid assimilation, and yet is musically always methodical, organized and extremely knowledgeable and versed in precedent – such as the music of Bach, Handel, Palestrina, Mozart, Haydn, Clementi, Cramer, Dussek, Rossini and many others.”
In this regard, learning the rules before you discard them seems to be a fitting mantra for Beethoven, as Vonsattel adds. “The fundamental approach of industriously following, bending and breaking rules from a position of great knowledge and supreme musical talent yielded Beethoven’s incredible output and explains its depth. Tracing the evolution of Beethoven’s creative project is to explore what the human mind can achieve at its highest level, beginning from the humblest elements.”