Director of Marketing and Publicity Craig Kaufman caught up with UMass Professor of Piano Gilles Vonsattel as he prepares for one of the most grueling undertakings in the classical music repertoire.
Gilles Vonsattel is in the midst of a multi-year journey through one of the most challenging and important catalogs in the classical music canon.
The professor of piano in the Department of Music and Dance is traveling from coast to coast, performing all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas in a series of concerts at prestigious venues in New York and California. This coming year, he will also present a set of free concerts at UMass showcasing these brilliant compositions and his mastery of his craft.
Vonsattel will offer four concerts each semester at Bezanson Recital Hall, with each presenting different sonatas from Beethoven’s repertoire. The fall performances will be held on October 22nd, October 29th, November 19th, and December 16th (Beethoven’s birthday). The spring concerts are on January 22nd, February 26th, March 6th, and March 22nd.
All of those performances begin at 7:30pm and are free to attend. Vonsattel will also discuss and perform the Hammerklavier Sonata on Tuesday, October 13th at 11:00am as part of the department’s free Listening Room series. Other lectures are planned for Oct. 28, Nov. 18 and Dec. 15 at 7:30pm at Amherst College's Center for Humanistic Inquiry at the Lyceum, 1st floor "Think Tank," 197 S. Pleasant Street.
Vonsattel was originally tapped by the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center to tackle this one-of-a-kind endeavor, learning and performing a total of 11 hours of the greatest music written just for one performer. It is an undertaking that has never been presented at the New York music institution, and an honor unlike any bestowed on a UMass Music and Dance faculty member.
After signing on at Lincoln Center, Vonsattel partnered with Camerata Pacifica, where he is the principal pianist, for a three-season engagement, and Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival and Institute, both in California, setting himself up to share the music of Beethoven from coast to coast.
“It’s an absolute career landmark for me,” said Vonsattel, who has been teaching at UMass since the fall of 2010. “Beethoven wrote these sonatas regularly, so playing these pieces is like reading a journal of his evolution. It’s great to study these pieces academically, or enjoy listening to them, but when you play them onstage you get a glimpse into the composer’s mind in a way that’s unbelievable. You get this fusion with Beethoven’s evolution, and they become part of you. It’s an extraordinary journey.”
Vonsattel’s performances, along with a lecture series at Lincoln Center, will take place over six months beginning in October of 2026, while his Menlo schedule runs from summer 2026 through summer 2027. He is already underway at Camerata Pacifica, where under the brand “Beethoven32”, he will perform over a three-year span.
“Gilles Vonsattel’s cycle of Beethoven’s piano sonatas in a single season will be not only an historic first for CMS, but a significant event globally, as few pianists anywhere have undertaken this monumentally difficult challenge,” said artistic directors David Finckel and Wu Han in the Lincoln Center season announcement press release.
Keeping his busy schedule straight is no small task for Vonsattel, who also has to find time to take his son to his soccer games. At 11 years old, his son is already playing Beethoven’s sonatas himself, even beating his father in the race to learn Opus 14 No. 2.
Vonsattel likes to exercise, but these days all he has time for is a workout of a different kind. Preparing and performing these pieces is a test of endurance, persistence and self-discipline. Slack off one day and Vonsattel has messed up weeks of a meticulously planned schedule.
I’ll be hitting the beach when I’m done with this project,” he says longingly.
He is up most days at 5:00 AM. On the morning we spoke, he had already spent an hour and a half learning Ionescu’s Second Violin Sonata for an upcoming concert in Philadelphia (he continues to play other concerts and works by other composers simultaneously with this Beethoven quest). As I approached his office, I could hear him working away at Opus 78, an intimate, funny and beautiful piece that Beethoven claimed was his favorite, despite the many towering masterpieces that overshadow it.
He is relaxed, clearly enjoying our conversation, but there is a small flutter of nervousness as we approach 10:30 AM. It’s clear he has to get back to work. He needs to rehearse Opus 101 before a lesson with one of his students, eat a quick lunch, and spend some time with Opus 2 No. 2, a very difficult early sonata that he needs to have ready in a month. After two more lessons, one with a UMass undergraduate and one with a grad student, he will head home to an already prepared dinner, then spend the evening memorizing the Tempest Sonata (Opus 31 No. 2) before heading to bed around 10:30, his alarm once again set for pre-dawn the next day.
“You learn how to work better by doing something like this,” he told me, explaining that Beethoven wrote these pieces for private study and enjoyment by gifted amateurs as the institution of a piano recital did not yet exist. “Beethoven never thought anyone would do this - he actually would think it was very strange.”
While he has played many of these sonatas before, almost all of them need some refreshing. “It’s like a triage,” he explained. “I have to decide which sonatas need cardiac resuscitation and which I can leave alone a bit and just check in on.”
Some of the pieces, including several of the hardest sonatas, he has never played and needs to learn from scratch. Still, he relishes the task of playing one of his favorite composer’s entire catalog, and he recognizes the trust that has been put in him to bring this music to life.
“They have heard me playing Beethoven (at Lincoln Center) for decades, so this is a huge vote of confidence to be asked to do this. I appreciate their support and I don’t take this task lightly.”