MINSOO SOHN
Minsoo Sohn loves a monumental challenge. After the last three sonatas in 2025, the South Korean pianist now offers the late Diabelli Variations, complemented by delightful Bagatelles, in which Beethoven reveals his most intimate emotions with an open heart.
Programme
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Bagatelles Op. 119
Interval
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Diabelli Variations Op. 120
Minsoo Sohn plays Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109: II. Prestissimo in Verbier
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In 2020, the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, Minsoo Sohn completed a four-year immersion in the German composer’s work, performing and recording the complete sonatas. In this bicentenary year of his death, the pianist (and mentor of Yunchan Lim) returns to his composer of choice with two works from the very last period. On the one hand, the Bagatelles, which, admittedly, span some twenty years (Beethoven himself called them ‘trifles’) but in which the composer of Fidelio unfolds the shifting moods of his personality like an intimate diary. On the other, the monument of the Diabelli Variations, which, from a little waltz by the publisher of the same name, trace a gigantic musical arc (nearly an hour of music) to depict the entire palette of human feelings. The late pianist Alfred Brendel saw in them quite simply ‘the greatest of all piano works’.
