ALL Beethoven, all the time. That’s what Daniel Barenboim’s bringing to Carnegie Hall starting tonight, when he plays all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas – by heart and with all his soul.
“When you’re playing them, you have to summon all the courage you have to give everything that is in you,” Barenboim told The Post.
“Beethoven was a total nonconformist – he always went beyond what was accepted.”
So has the 60-year-old Barenboim – the Israeli pianist, conductor and peacemaker whose day job is music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Never one to shy away from a challenge, Barenboim was 17 when he first performed the sonatas by heart – though not, he says with a laugh, “without a few memory slips.”
He made headlines recently for conducting Wagner – Hitler’s favorite composer – an encore from “Tristan und Isolde” at a festival in Israel, where Wagner’s music has been taboo for decades.
“You can’t do such a volatile thing and force it on people,” says Barenboim, who preceded the piece with a question-and-answer session. Still, 50 people – out of an audience of 3,000 – walked out.
For the last few years, Barenboim’s been attracting attention by leading an orchestra of young Arab and Israeli musicians who perform in Europe each summer.
Like Beethoven, whose Ninth Symphony – a manuscript of which fetched over $3 million at auction last month – is a paean to brotherhood, Barenboim believes music can change the world.
“The fact that music is abstract and doesn’t use words,” he says, “does not make it any less important.”
The first of eight concerts starts tonight at Carnegie Hall. For more information, call (212) 247-7800.