Crowdfunding for Beethoven 1827⇄2027: A New Sonata Cycle, Volume 1
Starting a new Beethoven Sonata Cycle
What draws me to Beethoven is the rawness — the manic excitement, the tumult, the struggle, the frustration, and the boldness running underneath all of it. I've spent years chasing that on instruments from his own lifetime, because modern pianos smooth it away. What I have never been able to do is find out whether any of it actually reaches the person listening.
That question is what the recording I've just launched on Kickstarter is built around. It is prospectively the first volume of a new complete Beethoven sonata cycle: Op. 26, Op. 54, Op. 78 (À Thérèse), Op. 79 and Op. 90 — around 73 minutes of music, recorded in March 2027, two hundred years after Beethoven's death.
The instrument is my own John Broadwood & Sons grand, built in London around 1806, which came from the Colt Clavier Collection and was restored in Amsterdam by Paul Kobald in 2022. It has the English lever action developed by Americus Backers: heavier and more resonant than a Viennese fortepiano, with an una corda that can strike one, two or three strings while the unstruck ones ring sympathetically. Beethoven wouldn't receive his own Broadwood until 1817, but he had been writing toward these instruments since the Érard arrived in 1803, and this piano answers that music in a way a modern one cannot.
Running alongside the recording is a Listening Lab, and it is the part I would most like you to join. Normally you meet a recording once every decision has been locked by one person working alone. Here you hear the playing while it is still open, and what you report back changes it.
Backers get access to experiments which I will set up on Mattheson, the research platform I built for this: you listen to short excerpts and register what you actually feel, moment by moment, choosing from twelve passions drawn from period writing on the emotions. Some rounds are blind comparisons between two of my own takes, so you are judging the playing and not the label on it. Responses are anonymous. That makes the interpretation accountable in a way I have never managed on my own. If a passage I meant as defiance reads as resignation to most of the lab, that is evidence, and I still have time to do something about it. The decisions stay mine — this is not interpretation by committee — but they answer to what the music does to people rather than to what I assume it does. Everyone taking part gets the results of each round, and a final report connecting what we found to the finished record.
The goal is €7,000. There's an introductory experiment open to anyone on the campaign page if you want to try the lab before deciding.