Pianist to play a Beethoven ‘sonata-thon’ at McCarter

Ludwig van Beethoven began composing piano sonatas when he was a young man of 23, and continued composing them until he was 51, after he became deaf. In that time he composed 32 sonatas.

 

 

This Saturday, Stewart Goodyear will perform all of them, back-to-back, in consectutive order, from memory, at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey. He’s calling the 10-hour recital, in 103 movements, a Sonatathon.

A graduate of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, Goodyear has been digging into Beethoven for the past several years; in 2012 he released a 10-CD box set of the complete sonatas.

We asked him to explain his love of Beethoven’s work.