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Photo credit: Manfred Fuß

The timing was unfortunate for Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250th birthday celebration.

Commemorations of the fêted composer came in 2020 (scholars’ best guess at his birthday is 1770), just as the world was shutting down in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic—and opportunities to experience the great artist’s music and legacy in person disappeared.

So David Korevaar, distinguished professor of piano at ��ɫ��Ƶ’s College of Music, sought alternative ways to honor Beethoven’s oeuvre in the face of lockdowns and social distancing.

“I found myself, like many of us, at something of a loss—no concerts, no in-person teaching, isolated at home,” Korevaar recalls now. “I had been thinking of filling in the gaps in Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas—there were a few that I had never played—and that inspired me to begin the process of playing through all of them and sharing ‘quick and dirty’ video recordings from home on my YouTube channel.”

Those videos (which are still available on��) were only the beginning. Korevaar found himself intrigued by the prospect of recording the complete sonatas properly and—in his role at the College of Music—he realized that he had the resources to realize that vision. With support from the college's C.W. Bixler Family Foundation Faculty Initiatives Fund, Korevaar set about doing justice to Beethoven’s timeless music.

“I talked with Kevin Harbison—the College of Music’s fantastic recording engineer—with Kawai America and with the college’s scheduling guru Brooke Balbuena to set up sessions in our gorgeous new Chamber Hall,” Korevaar says, adding that Kawai came through with a loan to the college of a 9-foot Shigeru Kawai concert grand for a year. “We recorded in a series of sessions that ended in July 2024 with all 32 sonatas completed.”

The next step was finding a way to share roughly 11 hours of music with the world. Enter Prospero Classical, a Swiss orchestral music label that offered Korevaar and his crew a thoroughly modern and multifaceted way to distribute the music. On March 7, the label will release a two-CD physical release of highlights from the sonatas followed by a series of digital-only albums of the sonatas issued chronologically.

“The two CDs will feature three sonatas from Beethoven’s ‘heroic’ period—so called because of the composition of the Eroica Symphony during this time: The Sonata Op. 53 (‘Waldstein’), Sonata Op. 54, Sonata Op. 57 (‘Appassionata’) as well as the ‘Andante favori,’ a movement originally intended to be part of the ‘Waldstein’ sonata,” Korevaar explains. “The second CD has two more sonatas, both of which Beethoven suggested be published as written for the ‘Hammerklavier,’ a German word for piano.”

All of the recorded sonatas (with the exception of Op. 106) are also up on Spotify as EPs;��

This approach offers a perfect way to share Beethoven’s music in the era of streaming and Spotify; it also offers a way to fulfill a musical mission that first came to Korevaar during the pandemic.

“I really wanted and, in a way, needed to do these properly,” he adds. “To record professionally, in a beautiful space, on a beautiful piano, with a first-rate engineer.”