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Hey.

It's a good practice room.

Have fun!

There are different ambitions.

As a pianist, my ambition is always to develop,

to get better, to understand this music better.

I've always liked to go into one composer,

to have certain projects,

so for a while I would concentrate on Schumann's Sonatas.

Before five years, I was doing CD project of Liszt,

I was doing a couple of Haydn recordings,

that made me really focus quite a lot on one composer.

As a pianist, you have such a variety of repertoire

and possibilities, so this opportunity

to go a little bit deeper into something

is important for me.

I felt increasingly the last years

that Beethoven is really,

the most meaningful music there is.

I love so many aspects of Beethoven's music,

the energy, the sound, the drama, the storytelling,

the feeling that there's always a goal,

there's always somewhere to go.

He knows where he's going and he knows what he's telling,

and he's telling something big.

This music is so potent, it's so full of virility,

original ideas, and surprises.

It's so rich, and that's why I really feel

I can work four years on this music

and never get tired of it.

Beethoven is considered by many

the greatest composer that ever lived.

I've heard most of it, his symphonies, masses,

sonatas, trios, quartets, quintets, and opera,

but above all for me it's the five piano concertos

that have been popular since the day they were written.

Five piano concertos that reveal much

about Beethoven's life and work.

Five piano concertos that, at some point,

basically every concert pianist decides to tackle.

The Beethoven Journey is more or less a four year period

where I am really working in depth

on the five piano concertos by Beethoven.

And not only the five piano concertos,

but also other Beethoven pieces, the sonatas for piano solo,

but the main focus are the five piano concertos,

and I'm making recordings of them over a three year period.

The last year I am doing several residencies

in several cities, playing all the five piano concertos.

I will play in over 50 cities,

maybe 150 performances, maybe more.

It's really a big, big journey for me

and I hope to learn a lot about Beethoven

in these years as well.

Obviously I'm searching to find my own

interpretation of these pieces,

and that's part of the journey as well.

It's really for me a journey

that I wanted to make for myself.

The basic story is well known,

born in Bonn on the river Rhine in Germany.

I believe it was a mid-December day in 1770

that he was born in a top floor apartment.

His father was a musician at the court

and Ludwig obviously followed in his footsteps.

At age seven he gave his first concert.

By age 13, he had the best teachers that Bonn could provide.

I don't know this pedal system.

And this one?

Beethoven's music makes such an impact to a child,

I mean, to a sensitive child,

if you play the first bars of the Moonlight Sonata,

there's such an immediate atmosphere to that,

that the child will get sad

or get a strong emotional reaction to it.

From there, there is a whole rainbow

of ideas and of emotions and of reactions to this music.

My parents always encouraged me

and I would say even at this age when I was 11, 12,

I didn't really want to play the piano.

I wanted to do more social things with my friends.

They rather pushed me to go through that period

because they saw that I had a real talent.

I think I was 14, 15 before I suddenly realized

that, oh my goodness, I'm a pianist,

I am really a pianist, I can't stop this.

I felt so at home, I felt that this was my language,

this was my way of communicating,

much more than by talking.

I was on tour in Sao Paulo a few years ago

and I checked into a hotel

and realized that they were playing,

in the lifts they were playing a CD

of Beethoven's first and second piano concertos

in a loop the whole week.

After two days, I thought this would make me absolutely mad,

but the opposite happened,

and I realized that listening to 37 seconds of these pieces

each time I entered the lift was quite wonderful,

because I could just hear that bit

and I thought, "Oh, how beautiful is that

"and how original and how strange

"and how fresh and how different from any other music."

And I thought, "Now is the time for me to tackle that,

"now it is time for me to do Beethoven."

I grew up on a small Norwegian island,

and then as a 16 year old I moved to a city, Bergen,

to study and to try to start a career.

Beethoven was obviously among the composers that I studied.

He, too, moved from the provincial Bonn

to the music capital of the world, Vienna,

and it's there that he wrote

some of the greatest music in history.

I'm early in my journey in understanding Beethoven,

but I want to understand more,

I want to know more, what it was like

in the beginning of the 19th century, in Vienna,

what the particular reasons why he wrote like he wrote.

The second concerto is actually the first concerto,

but he got it published second,

that's why we call it second.

It was really a work in progress for him

because he started it as a teenager in Bonn,

and then presented it years later in Vienna.

I think the audiences will have noticed

this incredible vitality and this virtuosity,

this new sound also from the orchestra,

very strong and bold choices.

In the first movement, has this suddenly this unison.

And then just moving it up to this soft,

and then it's in a very different key.

And that kinda music, one wouldn't have heard before.

The state of music here

is becoming worse and worse.

Conditions are worst of all at the Theater of der Wien.

The musicians were enraged when, from sheer carelessness

a mistake had been made in the simplest

and most straight forward passage in the world,

I suddenly make them stop playing

and called out in a loud voice, "Once more."

Such a thing had never happened to them before.

On the day before my concert, they so went to pieces.

It was as if they had suffered a shipwreck.

I had a vision that it would be absolutely wonderful

to work with a great chamber orchestra,

which I now am working with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.

The Mahler Chamber Orchestra has a crucial role

in this project, in that I'm recording the concertos

with them and we do many, many tours.

They are such a fantastic group of people

and of musicians.

I get so many ideas from them.

It's young orchestra, but it's not youth orchestra.

There is a young energy to it,

but they are also very experienced musicians.

They have been around, they have done a lot

with great people, so it's a very good mix,

and also interesting that there are so many nationalities.

This is an orchestra so full of vitality

and such an ability to find and discover

all the different characteristics and possibilities

in these magic pieces.

Amazing musicians, and I get so much from them.

It's often frustrating for a soloist

that you work with a conductor who has different ideas,

who's a little bit on the side.

You sit in the solo position,

sort of far from the orchestra.

Here, I'm sitting in the middle of the orchestra,

in the middle of the action.

We are looking at each other, we have such direct contact.

We're hearing each other extremely well,

which is important in this music

because there's such a feeling of dialogue so many times.

There's also often a fight between the piano and orchestra.

It's mixed in these concertos.

When I'm there conducting in the middle,

I feel I'm in the drama of the music constantly.

They wouldn't have had a conductor at that time.

A conductor often can get in the way,

it's an extra added element which is not really necessary

because we really mostly need to listen to each other.

Of course an orchestra needs a center, a focus,

somebody who gives energy,

and that's why I'm also conducting a little bit

and certainly rehearsing with them,

but they are also so capable of giving character

to the music when they listen to my playing,

and also by their own playing.

This is the first piano concerto

in which people hear Beethoven play in Vienna,

and he had to mark himself as an original,

he was an original.

One thing, for instance, is the ending

of the second movement.

The orchestra has big chords.

Stops very open, and the piano starts.

So simple, and he asks the performer

to keep the pedal down all the time.

And then the orchestra comes in, and whispers.

He asks for me to keep the pedal down

the whole ending here.

Of course, he didn't play on a Steinway,

and the piano at that time wouldn't

have the same length of resonance,

so I have to take into consideration that when I play

and maybe change the pedal slightly.

But he wanted a very specific effect, a blurry effect.

He didn't want it to be clean.

I should never have written down

this kind of piece, had I not already noticed

fairly often how some people in Vienna,

after hearing me extemporize of an evening,

would note down on the following day

several peculiarities of my style

and hand them off with pride as their own.

I resolve to forestall those people,

to embarrass those Viennese pianists,

some of whom are my sworn enemies.

He was really going for it.

He writes (speaks in foreign language) on this long note,

very clearly, which means that he wants this

really to be emphasized.

He wants to show that,

lets put the emphasis on the weak part of the bar,

to make a sort of collision

between the right and left hand here.

I'm sure he was not shying away from it.

He was showing it very clearly to his audience.

I am not wicked.

Hot blood is my fault.

My crime is that I am young.

Even though wildly surging emotions may betray my heart,

yet my heart is good.

To do good whenever one can, to love liberty above all else,

never to deny the truth.

I love to play for an audience.

I love to communicate music,

to say, "Look how wonderful this is."

But then I think ultimately it is very much

an internal process.

It's very much about the moments

that I have alone with the piano.

If I didn't love sitting at the piano for hours and hours,

to find out how this music works

and how I can develop it,

it also wouldn't work in front of an audience.

So that internal process is very, very important to me

and I've felt that since I was eight, nine years old,

this was the place I wanted to be.

The first concerto is even more confident, I think.

He's more sure of what he wants.

You feel a longer line also in the phrases.

It's not as short.

It's not yet as epic as the later ones,

but it has stronger tread through it,

and even more tension, I would say.

You can ask a lot of pianists about Beethoven's first,

and they would say, "Ooh, difficult one."

I think that he is clearly trying to show

what he can do, in so many ways.

I mean, both in terms of virtuosity as a pianist,

he was more famous as a pianist

than as a composer in the beginning,

though at that time, they didn't distinguish

between the two terms.

But he's also so much trying to show off

what he can do in the way of composition.

Beethoven was a master of development,

and what he does with this in this grand first movement,

it's not a small concerto, it's a big concerto, is amazing.

The space, the provocation,

this sort of, look what I can do,

the enormous contrast, it's all there from the start.

I have cursed my Creator and my existence.

Vienna's flooded with musicians,

and thus, even the most deserving

find it difficult to make a living.

He wanted to show off.

He wanted to show off how well he could play the piano

and how well he could write for the piano

and how well he could compose.

He's terribly confident at this point.

I mean, he writes,

all these sort of technical things.

Okay, suddenly there are triplets

with short staccatos in there in the left hand, 16 notes.

I mean, this was terribly exciting for him

to show off what he could do,

and there's such a potency in that.

It's meant to be virtuosity.

My dearest friend Eleonore,

I should very much like to be the fortunate possessor

of another waistcoat of angora wool,

knitted by you, my beloved friend.

I must tell you a secret,

namely that there is a touch of vanity

fundamentally connected to my request,

for I want to be able to say

that I have received a present

from one of the best and most adorable girls in Bonn.

I live entirely in my music,

and hardly have I completed one composition

when I have already begun another.

At my present rate of composing,

I often produce three or four works at the same time.

Reading Beethoven's letters,

you can tell what an extraordinary time

it must have been in Vienna.

Mozart had died prematurely young,

but left a remarkable legacy.

Haydn was still alive and working,

and were many other composers.

The Austrian Hungarian emperor and his nobles

had been active commissioning new works.

Mind you, you can sense in his letters

the unease the 1789 Revolution in France had created.

You might have expected seriousness

and high-minded thoughts, but actually, he's quite witty,

quite funny about things.

We are having very hot weather here,

and the Viennese are afraid that soon

they will not be able to get anymore ice cream,

for as the winter was so mild, ice is scarce.

Here, various important people have been locked up.

It is said that a revolution is about to break out,

but I believe that so long as an Austrian

can get his brown ale and his little sausages,

he is not likely to revolt.

People say that the gates leading to the suburbs

are to be closed at 10:00pm.

The soldiers have loaded their muskets.

You dare not raise your voice here,

or the police will take you into custody.

The man who writes this music

is a man extremely happy about what he can do.

The message is, of course, so big,

for eternity, for humanity, it's so meaningful.

But it's also somebody really celebrating

that he can do it.

I was reading the other day

that two days before the first performance

of the first concerto, he wrote the last movement.

He was feeling not very well,

and he writes this extremely funny, good humored music.

You know, with this,

dancing, slightly Turkish march like theme.

And then he gets to where they are performing

and the piano is half a tone too low,

so he has to transpose the piano part up to C sharp major.

That, for me, tells one

he was an incredible virtuoso.

That is a really difficult beginning

of a movement of a piano concerto.

To transpose that, then,

I mean, I wouldn't have a chance.

And, from there on,

what did he do?

He did it on the spot.

What a genius.

When I think about humor in music,

I'm always thinking about this place

in the last movement of Beethoven's first.

It's so funny,

I actually feel we have missed something

if we don't make people laugh in the concert hall,

or at least smile.

Because this music is clearly intended

to put a smile on people's faces.

I always feel with the orchestra we start laughing.

It's like a boogie woogie.

And it's so wild, to write,

you see?

It's very difficult

to play this left hand.

I can't remember anything from that period,

I mean, we're talking 1801, which sounds like that,

and the sort of jazzy emphasis.

That's how he writes his emphasis.

It's just so funny.

When playing and listening to this music,

I'm thinking, "This is not the sort of miserable,

"stately figure that we so often

"think of with Beethoven," and we see on all these busts.

This is a really lively person

who loved to sit down and improvise, play with his friends.

I think he must've been really happy in this period.

This is music of a happy man.

With these two concertos,

Beethoven clearly established himself in Vienna

as a great pianist and a great composer.

Audiences must have been thinking

and been very eager to know, what's coming next?

The main reason for recording here in Prague

is this wonderful, wonderful hall, the Rudolfinum,

which I think is perfect for this music

because it's reverberated as a beautiful, golden sound,

and it's not too large.

I think for pieces like this you need real acoustic.

You need real rooms when you're recording as well.

To record in a studio is not the same,

and then we're doing recordings live as well,

which hopefully will give the performances

some vitality and energy that is difficult

to achieve in the studio.

Good, good, and that's probably better than what we did.

We'll have to do it a few times.

Okay?

I'm so happy with the recordings right now,

and I hope we can keep that level

but of course I hope to grow, as well.

I hope we discover new things.

It should feel like a warm towel.

Yes.

When you come out the shower,

you know how that should feel.

You know, obviously there is a development.

It's not a cycle of pieces,

they are independent pieces,

and from number three it becomes more epic

and then it becomes more and more original.

Just great inventions,

but that doesn't mean that the two first are student pieces.

Very far from it.

I often read that when I read about the five concertos,

that, you know, oh he learned from Haydn, Mozart,

and then later on developed his own style.

Absolutely not true.

He's Beethoven from the start,

but he's becoming more and more daring, of course.

Beethoven must clearly have known

Mozart's C minor concerto, which goes,

very sort of shadowy.

Then when Beethoven writes his third concerto,

it starts with the same two first notes,

in a way that's much more primitive,

that's more elemental.

But what he does with it through the piece,

that's extremely sophisticated.

A solo cadenza is a very important part of these pieces,

and there are sometimes several cadenzas in one piece,

but the main one comes at the sort of culmination point

of the first movement,

after things have been really building up

and you feel the struggle

and there's anticipation of something great to happen.

Then the soloist gets the possibility

to show his skills as a virtuoso performer,

and at that time, as an improviser.

What we have from Beethoven, fortunately,

are his improvisations, he wrote them down,

and some of the cadenzas, so, so great.

I cannot imagine playing other composers' attempts on these.

Like in this third concerto, it's so dramatic

and he just throws himself out there on stage.

And with such a passage, he's gone completely wild

and he's going to the extremes of what the piano could do.

Because at that time, he didn't have the register

at his disposal.

His pianos would go up approximately to here

and down to here,

and he's always going to the extremes, Beethoven.

He's going to the top note, to the bottom note.

At the end of this gigantic solo cadenza,

he ends with long trills on the piano, typically for him.

And now, this chord from the orchestra will come in,

and at the same time, the timpani is playing,

and then I'm answering.

And,

and this, if you remember this theme from the beginning,

this motif.

It's now only in the timpani,

under these very mysterious and scary chords,

and it's like this has become a heartbeat for me.

It's just really remarkable

how he turned that motif into something so significant.

It's much more epic, this concerto.

You feel it from the beginning,

the ambition and the storytelling goes further.

The second movement, after the first movement has ended

with this huge explosion in C minor,

the second movement starts with E major,

which is very far away from C minor.

And that is a mild shock, one can say,

because this music is,

caressing us so much, and it's in such a dream.

It's so far away.

That's a huge development from the two first concertos.

All the time he's reaching out

for something greater than himself,

and that's what makes his music so fascinating,

because it's so human on one side

and it's celebrating human life

and so full of dances and earthly behavior and struggles.

And at that same time, there are these moments

of stretching out, and it's so spiritual.

Dear Franz, how is Letzte?

I am dreadfully lazy about writing letters,

and it takes me a long time to write down instead of notes,

some dry letters of the alphabet.

I am very sorry that you, my beloved and worthy colleague

in the art of music, did not let me know

something about your financial problems sooner,

for I could have given you some of my quartets to sell,

and also many other works.

I hope that if works of art can produce any profit,

it will fall to the lot of genuine and true artists,

rather than to that of mere tradesmen.

For the time being, I am offering you

the following compositions, including my first symphony.

How much that sum amounts to

in your

does not concern me, because I am really

an incompetent businessman who is bad at arithmetic.

There ought to be in the world a market for art,

where the artist would only have to bring his works

and take as much money as he needed.

But, as it is, an artist has to be, to a certain extent,

a businessman as well.

I call it a tiresome business.

Dear Ferdinand,

see immediately, dear friend, whether the proof

of the piano concerto is correct.

My health problems do not allow me to do this,

and the matter permits no further delay.

When you have corrected the proof,

bring it to me at once.

When I started this journey,

I actually didn't know that Beethoven

developed his deafness very early on.

At least the beginning of it, when he was in his early 20's,

he already knew that he had a problem,

and it gradually developed into a serious handicap.

But that means that absolutely most of his major works

are written in this kind of situation,

where he knows that he is not going to be able

to keep his hearing.

The third is a remarkable and strong work

and so full of human struggles,

and it's always difficult to know

what is reflected from Beethoven's life in these pieces.

One cannot help to think that this was the period

when he was really realizing that he was turning deaf.

There's a lot of darkness,

there's a lot of suffering in this piece.

A lot of isolation.

It's not sad, it's not angry,

and it's also not happy.

It's ambiguous, and that's what's so great

with so much of this music.

It has a little bit of all different kind of emotions.

It's a journey from the first note to the last,

and all these valleys and mountains and lakes

you have to visit, and the flowers you have to smell.

You get to know that the more you play for people,

it's not only how to study in the practice room.

What's striking me about Beethoven and his music

is how hard he works to make it all seem

so natural and effortless.

For example, I've looked at Beethoven's manuscripts,

and it's just full of changes.

He's erasing, he's scratching out,

taking out things, adding new things.

It's interesting that whenever he could,

he headed to the countryside for relief.

I've always felt the same.

200 plus days of airports and foreign hotels,

different faces, and you just need to recharge.

For me as a Norwegian,

I need to get into my own countryside.

Once a year, for example, I go to an estate

at Rosendal for a small, intimate performance

that I've been doing since I was young,

and it really means as much to me

as Carnegie Hall or Royal Festival Hall.

And right now, it's a chance to play something else

from Beethoven's enormous output.

The concerto, only one part of Beethoven's output,

of course, and I wanted the Beethoven Journey

to also include chairman music and solo pieces and sonatas.

I'm basically playing my first recital

with Vilde Frang, who is an absolutely

wonderful young Norwegian violinist

now making a big international career.

We have chosen the best piece of all,

Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata.

When I was 22, when I first came here,

I think I was struggling quite a bit with finding my way

in this strange profession,

because I wasn't sure how much

repertoire can I allow myself to do.

I was very restrictive, actually.

I did one recital program per season

and a couple of concertos,

and I felt already it was too much

if I had agreed to study a couple of pieces

for the next season, and I wouldn't sleep well.

I would cancel sometimes things far in advance

because I didn't feel in control of the situation.

It was only when I was 25, 26,

that I allowed myself to do more

and to do different things,

and I felt a certain kind of freedom.

This is my room.

I have to say for me, it's very important,

now and then, to come back to the small rooms,

and this is a really small room.

It seats about 70 people.

It's extreme, and a modern instrument

would maybe not work in this room,

'cause it would be too loud, it would scream.

I'm playing here on an 1860 Pleyel,

which is also a unique experience,

and this feeling that the instrument can speak and whisper,

it's a conversation.

It feels very honest

in a way that sometimes in the big hall it doesn't.

This decision now, to devote these four years

mainly to Beethoven is, it feels great,

because this music is so great and it deserves it.

It becomes easier to play this music

because the more you work on the language,

the better you get at it.

You understand not only the obvious messages

but the awkward messages

and the transitional works and the transitional passages,

the strangeness of it, and the enigma,

which is also part of Beethoven's oeuvres.

We have this image of Beethoven

as a very lonely character, don't we?

And quite an impossible man to be with.

Maybe that image is very wrong.

I mean, it seems like he was very close to people.

He worshiped his friends and his social life.

I'm cooking.

I love cooking.

It's the most relaxing thing there is.

An important part of my Beethoven Journey

is actually to get all kinds of different experiences

of Beethoven performances,

but I'm also working with different conductors

and different orchestras.

Now I'm in Los Angeles playing

with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

That's a very different ensemble

from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.

Sunglasses?

The speech study had a long line?

No no, no, no no no no no.

I've been very lucky to play

with some excellent conductors and orchestras,

and what I find as I'm growing up,

I'm playing more and more with conductors

from my generation, or even younger than me

like with Gustavo.

You can't get away from the fact

that it's easier somehow to feel free to say things.

I mean, with Gustavo, he's such a personality

where there's no vanity involved,

and I hate those kind of vanities.

I want conductors to say to me whatever they want,

and whatever their opinion is about the music

or how we're doing or how the performance feels.

And I want to have the same freedom

to tell them anything, and that feels

extremely freeing with Gustavo.

Sometimes we do feel connected to artists.

They build up a life together,

so we can see where our life as a musician

and as an artist together,

because I'm sure this is not the last time.

We will do this cycle, and I hope that we will do

more Mozart or whatever, Rachmaninoff, whatever composer.

And it's also a question of trust, right?

Mm hmm, exactly.

After a while, one really, really trusts each other.

In Spanish.

We respect the music, we respect each other.

We love music, and we love each other.

The most important thing.

Mahler Chamber Orchestra plays this music

with much less vibrato, and when they use vibrato

maybe it means more.

Maybe I prefer that way, but you know,

a big American orchestra like this

has such qualities, it can give other things to it.

And certainly with Gustavo,

it's incredible the rhythmic impulse and insition

and happiness he can bring.

In most collaborations like this,

there are moments at least, where I learn something.

That's why I'm doing this,

this is a journey.

I want to learn, and certainly with a conductor

like Gustavo, I am always learning.

I am well, very well.

My art is winning me friends and renown,

and what more do I want?

And this time I shall make a good deal of money.

I shalt remain here for a few weeks longer,

and then travel to Dresden, Latze, and Berlin.

I'm playing about 80 concerts a year

and I'm traveling about half the year,

and I don't want to feel like I'm living in a suitcase.

So even if I'm in a hotel room just for three or four nights

I will unpack my suitcase and I will put things

in the cupboard and try to feel like

I have a little home for a few days.

Well we're Skyping almost every day.

It's just wonderful, I am so happy

to be part of Skype generation.

I mean, I want to see my daughter every day.

She wants to play with me and I'm not there,

but at least she sees a glimpse of me every day

and she doesn't forget me.

The connection with foreign countries

is always an advantage to the reputation of an artist,

particularly if he starts traveling abroad.

I intend to sell the following six new works

to a firm of publishers in France, to one in England,

and to one in Vienna simultaneously,

but on condition that they shall not appear

until after a day to be fixed.

The works are a symphony, an overture,

a violin concerto, three quartets,

the violin concerto arranged for the piano,

and a new piano concerto.

The beginning of the fourth concerto

would have been a shock for the listeners at the time.

The first shock would be that the piano starts the concerto.

The normal thing would be, in a piano concerto,

that the orchestra has an introduction

presenting all the material,

and that the soloist would enter after a couple of minutes.

But here, the piano enters.

And the second shock is, it enters softly,

not with the normal fanfares,

just with a chord,

and out of this amazingly beautiful G major chord,

organically,

a theme occurs.

It's so simple, so heavenly.

Third shock, the orchestra responds,

but in such a surprising key suddenly, B major,

and even softer.

I mean that beginning, you have a sense of

what journey have we begun here.

This is such a new ambition,

so different from any music, until then.

What I sense in Beethoven's music

and more and more on this journey,

is the love that sits at it's heart.

It's remarkable when you think of what he faced

on a day to day basis,

the difficulties of the life in 19th century Vienna,

sanitation, food, disease, money, political instability.

And he bore three additional burdens,

his increasing deafness, his health problems,

I mean he frequently had such serious stomach problems

that he couldn't work.

And then, his unsuccessful attempts to find a wife.

Now you can help me look for a wife.

Indeed, you might find some beautiful girl,

one who'd perhaps grant a sigh to my harmonies.

She must be beautiful, because it is impossible for me

to love anything that is not beautiful.

It's tough to think that he never managed

to find a partner, so that he didn't have children,

but especially that he couldn't find a partner in life.

Because when you feel this incredible warmth

and how this music embraces you,

he must have had so much love to give.

Around Christmas time, we got to know that

Ragnild was expecting twins,

which was the first shock.

We hadn't planned to have such a big family,

but of course it's great.

The twins arrived much too early, 12 weeks early,

and there was no way I could do the recording and the tour.

I mean, seeing these two tiny babies.

They were born very extreme premature, and so fragile,

and we were very concerned

about what would happen with them.

I just needed to be with my family.

They are doing well.

This is where I get my exercise every day.

Unexpected things can happen to a journey,

and in this case, I had to cancel quite a few concerts

and delay a recording.

So what?

Family comes first.

Beethoven seemed to have had problems with love,

and if relationship will change the music,

how can we know such things?

His music is so full of everything one thinks of

that has to do with relationships and love.

It embraces life so fully.

How could it be richer if he had known

a different private life?

Hard to imagine.

Time and again, Beethoven sought partnership

with countesses or the daughters of nobility,

and time and again, this mere musician was rejected.

He was, literally, seeking a wife outside of his class,

and it was not to be.

That's in the music too, I think,

a struggle, a yearning.

In the later pieces especially

there is a feeling that things doesn't add up anymore.

There's a lonely feeling,

and there's a very spiritual feeling

of wanting to know something about life

and maybe not getting the answer anymore.

Maybe this is because he was isolated

because of the deafness.

Maybe it was because he was isolated in his life,

didn't have a family.

Difficult to know.

It's my job to make these pieces come alive

so that people can recognize in them the greatness,

and that they can recognize themselves

and their feelings and their struggles in life,

and their joys.

I think that's what we do with a great piece of art,

we come out from a concert and, having heard this,

we think, "Oh my goodness, he experienced all the troubles

"and joys and sorrows that I have in my life,

"all the longing, and he could express it

"in this pure form, which is music."

For me, as an interpreter,

I don't think it's necessary that I have suffered a lot

or felt all these struggles that these composers

often felt in their lives.

But I have, at least, to have the imagination

to get into these feelings, to feel the ecstasy,

to feel the sorrow.

The most shocking discovery anyone learns about Beethoven

is that, at this time when he seems

to be at the top of his game

and he's writing quartets, symphonies, and so on,

self-sufficient financially, in itself, highly unusual,

he's respected by the court and so on,

one finds that beneath the surface

there was a deep unhappiness,

leading him to question his very existence.

Oh ye who think or declare me to be hostile,

morose, or misanthropical.

How little you know me.

I've been attacked by an incurable malady,

born with a passionate and excitable temperament,

keenly susceptible to the pleasures of society.

I was yet obliged early in life

to pass my existence in solitude, for I am deaf.

What humiliation, when anyone beside me

hears a flute in the far distance, while I, nothing.

Or when others hear a shepherd singing,

and I, nothing.

Such things brought me to the verge of desperation,

and well nigh caused me to put an end to my life.

Out alone deterred me,

how could I possibly quit the world

before bringing forth all that I felt

was my vocation to put use?

In a way, this kind of music

is the beginning of romanticism.

What would come a couple of decades later

from Schumann, Chopin, all this very confessional music

for one to one, but here it's like it's the essence.

It hasn't become sick yet.

It's so pure, maybe that's why it's also so touching,

it's in its pure form.

It doesn't exploit the relationship to the listener.

It's remarkably touching.

You will realize what a sad life

I must now lead.

In my present condition, I must withdraw from everything,

and my best years will rapidly pass away

without my being able to achieve all that my talent

and my strength have commanded me to do.

This conflict between the orchestra and the pianist here

might also reflect how he was getting more and more

isolated in society, because of his handicap,

because he couldn't hear anymore.

At the same time,

I'm thinking maybe this is why this music

became so free, so different from any other music,

that he didn't anymore have to confront his outer ear,

he could really follow his inner voice.

The very end of this concerto, it always gets to me,

and what is it that it does, it's just magic.

It's like he's trying to fly.

It's just G major and D major.

And finally there is wind.

And off he goes.

For me that's total ecstasy.

See, I get the chills.

I have a wish for people to love what I'm loving, basically.

I think that is a driving force,

and therefore I'm also doing press and I'm doing TV

and whatever I can to bring this to people.

Of course, the music gives me the impulse to do this,

but it's also really fun.

I mean, what a life I have.

I have the opportunity, the last months now

I've played with Philharmonia in London,

I'm in Los Angeles, with great orchestras.

All of these orchestras, also, they play for full houses.

This week I'm playing basically for eight or 9,000 people.

What a privilege to share this music with so many people.

41.69 please.

The CD has been received very well.

There's been so many reviews, and largely very good ones.

I'm extremely happy about it.

There's great competition out there with these pieces,

there are many good recordings before,

but I think we have something, if not new, then different,

saying it in a different way.

To Brian and Eden.

I think actually the concerts are driving people to the CD

rather than the opposite.

That's how it works these days.

The record industry is not that blossoming anymore,

but people come to concerts, and actually,

concert venues are places for also selling CDs.

That's why I will agree to sign Beethoven CDs

after Beethoven performances,

because I think, maybe people want to have

a memory from the concert and go home

and listen to the same piece.

Thank you so much.

This is for my nephew, Joey.

I always find there's all these other necessary things

in my life, other than the traveling and meeting people

and talking to press and marketing for my concerts,

for my recordings.

That's all so superficial.

When I get down to the piano, I always remember

that's why I am here.

My compositions bring me in a good deal,

and I may say that I'm offered more commissions

than it is possible for me to carry out.

I stake my price, and they pay.

For instance, I see a friend in need,

and it so happens that the state of my purse

does not allow me to help him immediately,

I only have to sit down and compose

and in a short time, I can come to his aid.

My purpose in life is not to become a profiteer

in musical art, one who composes solely

in order to become rich, god forbid.

But, I like to live independently,

and that I cannot do without a small income.

Well the beginning of the fifth,

again, is another really surprising opening.

This time, just begins with a huge chord in the orchestra,

followed by what is a tsunami of a passage in the piano.

First this chord,

and then.

I find there's such an ecstasy in that,

and it's, for me, like he's saying,

finally, finally we got there.

You know, we were struggling through all these concertos

and finding our way,

and for me, that marks so much of the feeling

of the rest of this movement,

which is so much a celebration of liberty and freedom.

It doesn't have so much the searching qualities

and the struggles of the other concertos.

It has shadows, it has questions, but less of it.

I find it a sort of divine piece of music

that celebrates freedom.

There is such a sense of mastering the fifth,

and there is, not a sense of the same struggle

as some times in the third and fourth especially.

His mastery, his craft of writing these pieces was,

it's so incredible,

that you feel there's a liberty to it.

There's such a confidence in this piece.

It was by far the most played concerto in the 19th century,

and everything which came after Chopin, Liszt,

Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff,

Grieg, all these popular piano concertos,

they are dealing with the same sort of heroic, heroism,

which you have in this concerto.

Actually, the soloist is being thrown out

on the gladiator stage here from the beginning,

with these huge passages,

and it's very much a statement like in the Greek concerto.

In the show manner, you know, here I am.

That came from Beethoven.

My heart and mind were ever from childhood

prone to the most tender feelings of affection,

and I was always disposed to accomplish something great.

Yet I was obliged early in life to isolate myself.

I was deficient in that very sense

which ought to have been perfect,

but art prevented me from taking my own life.

Do not forget me.

I deserve this from you,

because during my life I wish to make you happy.

I find it very hard with some pieces of music,

and this second movement of the fifth concerto

is among them.

To imagine a man sitting down writing this music,

it's like it's always been there,

and it remains so hauntingly beautiful.

This idea, a lot of people say that Beethoven

couldn't write melodies, just because he was a master

of putting together motifs and creating

great structures out of that,

doesn't mean that he couldn't write a melody.

I mean, this is the most beautiful thing I, I know.

What a melody, and what heartbreaking harmonies

to go with it,

that last forever.

To know how isolated he was at this point in life,

and how he had discovered

really the seriousness about his handicap.

He couldn't play this piece.

That must have been such a feeling of failure.

And then this music,

that is so touching.

There is never for me a trace of self pity

in Beethoven's music,

even with that difficult a life.

This is a piece that my father loves very much,

and when I was little, he would play for me

an uppi that we had,

and especially he was crazy about the transition

from the second to third movements,

which is very special.

It dies down,

very calm,

wonderful, sort of lullaby like

version of the theme,

and then from B major,

we go to B flat.

Where we go now, a new theme is being introduced,

in like a dream.

Am I dreaming?

No, I'm not dreaming.

That's incredible.

One can wonder why he didn't write

more piano concertos after this one.

I think the main reason is that he couldn't play anymore

because of his deafness.

He couldn't play this concerto.

It was the first one, the only one he didn't play himself.

And then also, what do you do after a piece like this?

On this journey I've learned

how full of life and love this music is.

The key word for me now, after the journey, is freedom.

This music is just full of freedom.

This kind of music is something that I will

never grow tired of in life.

I can play these pieces endlessly.

Of course there is Bach, there is Mozart, but Beethoven

is really the greatest composer that ever lived.

I think we can call that a success.

Thank you.