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András Schiff The Complete Beethoven Sonatas Four Sundays at 7pm Co-presentation with San Francisco Symphony.
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—San Francisco Chronicle
ProgramS
About This Performance
To experience Beethoven’s piano sonatas is to understand Beethoven and his far-reaching impacts on music, culture and the modern musical mind. András Schiff completes his two-year cycle with the second half of Beethoven’s profoundly innovative output. These later sonatas are the meteoric measure of Beethoven’s genius unfolding, recounting in sound his personal and public triumphs and trials—the advancing introversion of deafness, the affairs of his public life and his heart, and his artistic progression from concerns of the world to the awareness of eternity and the immortal.
Co-presented with the San Francisco Symphony
Artist Biography
András Schiff was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1953. He began piano lessons at the age of five with Elisabeth Vadász and continued his musical studies at the Ferenc Liszt Academy with Professor Pál Kadosa, György Kurtág and Ferenc Rados; he also worked with George Malcolm in London. Recitals and special projects take him to all of the international music capitals and include cycles of the major keyboard works of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin and Bartók. In 2004, he began a series of performances in Europe exploring the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas in chronological order — a project recorded live for ECM New Series, to be released in eight volumes though 2009. The Beethoven Sonata Project in North America begins this season.
The Beethoven Sonata Project in its entirety is slated for New York's Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles's Disney Hall, San Francisco's Symphony Hall, and Ann Arbor's Hill Auditorium. Individual recitals are slated for Boston, Washington, DC, Princeton and Santa Barbara. Mr. Schiff makes his only North American concert appearance this season with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Bernard Haitink performing Bartòk's Piano Concerto No. 3.
In 1999, Mr. Schiff created his own chamber orchestra, the Cappella Andrea Barca, for a seven-year series of the complete Mozart piano concertos, taking place at the Mozartwoche of the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg. The group, consisting of international soloists, chamber musicians and close friends, toured North America during the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 seasons in a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. The six concerts included twelve of the Mozart piano concerti, chamber music and symphonies.
During the next few seasons, the focus of Mr. Schiff's orchestral activities will be conducting programs of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart from the keyboard. He has annual engagements with the Philharmonia Orchestra, London, and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe as conductor and soloist. He is a regular visitor as conductor and soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Staatskapelle Dresden, Budapest Festival Orchestra and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He has conducted Bach's B Minor Mass and Haydn's Creation with the London Philharmonia and was conductor and soloist with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe on a critically acclaimed tour of New York, Chicago and San Francisco.
Since childhood Mr. Schiff has enjoyed playing chamber music. He was Artistic Director of Musiktage Mondsee, an internationally praised, annual chamber music festival near Salzburg, from 1989 until 1998. He is presently joint artistic director of Ittinger Pfingstkonzerte, a chamber music festival he founded in Switzerland with Heinz Holliger in 1995. In 1998, Mr. Schiff started a similar series entitled Ommaggio a Palladio at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. From 2004-2007 he was Artist-in-Residence of Kunstfest Weimar, in Germany.
Mr. Schiff has established a prolific discography, including recordings for Teldec (1994-1997), London/Decca (1981-1994) and, since 1997, ECM New Series. Recordings for ECM include the complete solo piano music of Beethoven and Janáček, a solo disc of Schumann piano pieces and his second recording of the Bach Goldberg Variations. He has received several international recording awards, including two Grammy Awards for “Best Classical Instrumental Soloist (Without Orchestra)” for the Bach English Suites, and “Best Vocal Recording” for Schubert's Schwanengesang with tenor Peter Schreier, and, for the 49th annual Grammy Awards, was nominated for “Best Classical Album (Without Orchestra)” for the second volume of his Complete Beethoven Sontata recordings for ECM.
Among other honors, András Schiff was awarded the Bartók Prize in 1991 and the Claudio Arrau Memorial medal from the Robert Schumann Society in Düsseldorf in 1994. In March 1996, Mr. Schiff received the highest Hungarian distinction, the Kossuth Prize, and in May 1997 he received the Leonie Sonnings Music Prize in Copenhagen. He was awarded the Palladio d'Oro by the city of Vicenza, and the Musikfest-Preis Bremen for “outstanding international artistic work” in 2003. Recently, Mr. Schiff received two awards in recognition of his Beethoven Performances: in June 2006, he became an Honorary Member of the Beethoven House in Bonn, and in May 2007 he was presented with the renowned Italian Prize, the Premio della critica musicale Franco Abbiati in recognition of his Beethoven Piano Sonata Cycle. In October, Mr. Schiff was honored by the Royal Academy of Music with the institution's prestigious Bach Prize, sponsored by the Kohn foundation; the annual prize is awarded to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the performance and/or scholarly study of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
In 2007, András Schiff and music publisher G. Henle began a unique partnership to produce special, joint editions of Mozart and Bach. Mr. Schiff is currently editing the complete Mozart Piano Concerti to include his specific fingerings and cadenzas where the original cadenzas are missing. Once the Mozart project is complete, plans are set for Bach's Well Tempered Klavier to be edited with Mr. Schiff's insights and fingerings.
András Schiff is an Honorary Professor of Music Schools in Budapest, Detmold and Munich. In 2001, Mr. Schiff became a British citizen; he resides in Florence and London and is married to the violinist Yuuko Shiokawa.
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