Vancouver’s Georgia Straight interviews Leif Ove in advance of his recital this weekend
“When the Georgia Straight reaches pianist Leif Ove Andsnes at his home in Bergen, Norway, he’s taking a respite from packing his bags for the North American tour that will bring him to Vancouver this weekend. Life on the road never ends for even the most elevated performers, it seems. But at least one of Andsnes’s voyages has come to a happy conclusion: his Beethoven Journey, which found him recording all five of Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano concertos and performing them with Berlin’s Mahler Chamber Orchestra in cities around the globe.”
“It felt very strange, in a way, to end it, especially to say farewell to the wonderful musicians that I’d played so much with,” he says of the project, which had its finale in London, England, earlier this year. “But I have to say it was also a little bit liberating, to feel that I could play any music I wanted.”
Beethoven’s not done with him yet, though. On the program for Andsnes’s upcoming Vancouver Recital Society matinee is the German maestro’s Piano Sonata No. 18 in E-flat Major, which he describes as his “comfort” after concluding his four-year-long Beethoven intensive.”
Source: Georgia Straight