Immortally Beloved Repertoire Gone Big

Santa Barbara’s current wave of Beethoven-mania continues in the new year as the Santa Barbara Symphony (SBS) prepares for its two-day Beethoven Piano Concerto Marathon. In separate programs on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, January 17 and 18, The Granada Theatre will be the home base for all five of Beethoven’s legendary concertos, featuring gifted young pianists on the rise, if not of the household name status, yet.

This comes in the midst of a presumably coincidental convergence of Beethoven focus in town this season. It could be said to have begun with Jeremy Denk’s Beethoven+ trio of recitals during last summer’s Music Academy of the West festival, continuing with Camerata Pacifica’s current cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas (including the upcoming Friday, January 16, program at Hahn Hall) and in famed virtuoso Víkingur Ólafsson’s Hammerklavier sonata–centered recital at Campbell Hall last fall.

Moving on to the concerto portion of this unofficial Beethoven tribute season, Santa Barbara Symphony maestro Nir Kabaretti — currently in his 20th season at the SBS helm — has curated the marathon in a thematic rather than chronological fashion. On the Saturday-night menu, Beethoven’s Egmont overture serves as the introductory course leading concertos No. 3 and 4. Sunday’s program is a meaty portion, with No. 1 followed by No. 2, and logically finishing off with No. 5.

At the Granada, the piano throne rotation over the weekend features Min Joo Yi, Evren Ozel, Dmitry Shishkin, Angie Zhang, and Jonathan Mamora. Each pianist boasts important piano competition laurels to their name, from Yi’s win of the Music Academy of the West Solo Piano Concerto Competition to Ozel’s Cleveland International Piano Competition prize and Shishkin’s trophies from the International Tchaikovsky and Geneva International competitions.

Beethoven’s piano concertos, like his set of 32 piano sonatas, qualify as a repertorial world of its own in the universe of classical piano music. And in both cases, the various vintages and stylistic characters partly tell the story of the composer’s artistic evolution and immortal influence.

The official body of work spans his first concerto written as a precocious 25-year-old (actually written after the second, but numbered by the publisher), although he also wrote a concerto as a 14-year-old, but with only the piano part surviving. The grand and ever-popular fifth “Emperor” concerto, written in 1809, came at a stage when Beethoven’s severe hearing impairment prevented him from performing the piece himself.

Among the features of other concertos are a lightness in the second contrasted by the darker colorations of the third, and the unusual pensive solo piano opening of the sublime fourth concerto.

On this Granada weekend, listeners going the distance for both programs will be afforded the rare chance to compare and contrast a great body of music, live and in the orchestral/pianistic flesh. 

For extracurricular preparatory listening, check out the recording of the concerto cycle by Mitsuko Uchida with the Berlin Philharmonic at bit.ly/499pmUA.

For more information on the Beethoven Piano Concert Marathon weekend, see bit.ly/4918Ze8.