One of Leif Ove’s most ambitious projects to date was The Beethoven Journey, a monumental four-season focus on the composer’s music for piano and orchestra. This took the pianist to 14 countries for more than 230 live performances, including appearances at Carnegie Hall and London’s BBC Proms that were named among the “Best of 2015” by the New York Times and Guardian respectively. Released as a boxed set by Sony Classical, Andsnes’s accounts of Beethoven’s concertos were recognized with BBC Music’s Recording of the Year, iTunes’ Best Instrumental Album of the Year and Belgium’s Prix Caecilia.
This season, the pianist reprises his interpretation of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto on three continents. In the U.S. this fall, he performs it with Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony (Sep 30), and then with Jaap van Zweden and the New York Philharmonic (Oct 5–7). One of the orchestra’s most frequent and favored guests, Andsnes previously served as the NY Phil’s 2017-18 Artist-in-Residence.
In Asia and Europe, the “Emperor” is the vehicle for Andsnes’s season-opening concerts with the Belgian National Orchestra (Sep 8); dates in Sweden and Romania with the Gothenburg Symphony (Aug 31–Sep 15); a Japanese tour with the NHK Symphony and Herbert Blomstedt (Oct 25–29); a French tour with the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire (April 2–7); and a concert with Thomas Søndergård leading the London Symphony Orchestra (Feb 4). Under the baton of Nathalie Stutzmann, Andsnes also joins the LSO for Mozart’s 22nd Piano Concerto (Feb 8), of which his recording was chosen as one of the New York Times’s “25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2021,” and, as part of the two-volume series Mozart Momentum 1785/86, awarded Gramophone’s 2022 “Special Achievement” prize.
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