András Schiff BEETHOVEN Sonatas opp. 109, 110 and 111

When I'm so deeply absorbed in a composer, as I have been with Beethoven, then I physically and mentally begin to feel like him. Beethoven changed me as a person. There are composers who enrich you and uplift you - Beethoven is the best example. As a composer and as a person, I feel he has a lot of generosity, I have enormous choices. (András Schiff, The Guardian, September 2008)

In his final program Schiff unflinchingly abandoned his principle of live recordings. Beethoven’s music, he maintains, “needs great moments and spontaneous instants that only happen ‘live’ – if we’re lucky. And what happens if the concert doesn’t work? Then you don’t have to issue the results. For this reason I decided to record the last three sonatas again in the empty hall of the Reitstadel in Neumarkt, Germany, a few months after the Zurich performance. The recordings of all the other sonatas took place at the matinees in Zurich, with small corrections from the rehearsals. What we were trying to achieve were ‘valid’ performances of the works, and for that reason we deliberately did without any applause, which is always somehow disturbing in recordings.”