Versatile Spanish pianist Leopoldo Erice offers fresh new interpretations of Beethoven’s final three piano sonatas, Nos. 30, 31 and 32, in which the composer stretched the boundaries of convention to breaking point. Erice performed these works to mark Beethoven’s 250th anniversary celebrations in 2020, alongside a talk entitled ‘Beethoven’s Deafness: from Silence to Creation’. Leopoldo Erice, who grew up in Spain and is now resident in Canada, has deep and lifelong love of Beethoven’s music, which has come to fruition in his roles both as an academic and as an award-winning pianist. His approach to these three great sonatas is to perceive them through the filter of Beethoven’s deafness, which was complete by the time he composed these sonatas, but, crucially, regarding that deafness not as an impairment as much as a means to an exceptionally rich inner music that found an outlet in works such as these.
