A Revelatory ‘Hammerklavier’ Launches Camerata Pacifica’s New Season and ‘Beethoven 32’ Project
/By Truman C. Wang
10/30/2025
Camerata Pacifica doesn't believe in easing into things. For the opening salvo of its 2025/26 season—and the launch of an audacious three-year journey through all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas—artistic director Adrian Spence chose to begin not with youthful exuberance but with the Mount Everest of the piano repertoire: the "Hammerklavier" (No. 29, Op 106). I attended the first of four concerts on Tuesday night, October 28, at San Marino’s Huntington Library.
The 44-year-old Swiss-American pianist Gilles Vonsattel is wise to split up the sonatas and not perform them in one go as if it were, in Alfred Brendel’s words, “a circus, where the interpreter puts himself on display: a juggler, a tightrope-walker and trapeze-artist of piano-playing.” Schnabel played his first complete cycle in 1927, the centenary of Beethoven’s death, and made his famous recordings of the sonatas across four years (1932-35). In 1846, an 11-year-old Saint-Saëns offered as an encore to play any of the 32 sonatas from memory. Brendel himself played the sonata cycle in Carnegie Hall in 1983 (his third cycle), where it was largely well received in the press, with some finding him unemotional.
“Unemotional” is not a word I would describe Vonsattel’s playing, despite his body barely swaying or showing much expression in the entire 50-minute. His hands, however, told a world of emotions – nowhere was this more evident than in the Adagio sostenuto, that profound 20-minute meditation which forms the emotional core of the “Hammerklavier”.
Here, Vonsattel's interpretation transcended mere technical mastery. The movement, marked by Beethoven's almost unbearable tenderness and introspection, unfolded with an emotional narrative, traversing those long, searching, unresolving melodies with grace and poise. In the extraordinary conclusion, where the sound seemed to evaporate into the ether, Vonsattel held the audience in rapt silence. The outer movements were impressively extroverted – a powerful but clear opening Allegro, a tempestuous Scherzo crackling with demonic energy, an epic finale of staggering power and emotion.
Vonsattel’s Steinway was a protean instrument, producing gossamer pianissimos in rich tone and shimmering halos of sound without muddying the musical lines. The excellent sound, I suspect, was in part due to the movable ceiling panels in the hall, which were fully open like the lid of the Steinway.
Mozart's Wind Serenade in E-flat Major, K.375, provided a welcome respite after the titanic Beethoven. (Donald Tovey said one can speak of “the divine Mozart” or “the divine Rossini”, but not “the divine Beethoven.”) The octet of wind players (Nicholas Daniel and Claire Brazeau on oboes, Jose Franch-Ballester and Pascal Archer on clarinets, Eleni Katz and William Wood on bassoons, David Byrd-Marrow and Melia Badalian on horns) played with sparkling wit and disarming charm. The ensemble blended beautifully, most memorabily in the sunny, singing Andante.
Vonsattel returned for a musical soufflé, Chopin's G-Minor Nocturne. It was short, bittersweet with elegantly turned rubato that lingered on your musical palate long after it was gone.
Camerata Pacifica’s Beethoven sonata cycle will continue in 2026 (13 sonatas) and 2027 (18 sonatas). In these 32 sonatas, there is not an inferior work among them, and Beethoven does not repeat himself; each sonata, each movement is a new creation. I am looking forward to hearing the remainder of the cycle.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.