4 acousmatic variations on Sonata 106 “Hammerklavier” by Ludwig van Beethoven
for piano electronically processed in surround
Prelude to the Allegro (7:30)
Prelude to the Adagio. (6:00)
Postlude to the Scherzo. (2:56)
Interlude in the Fugue. (2:40)
The pieces will be performed acousmatically with a 7.1 amplification system.
The performance will include a complete performance of Beethoven’s sonata and a visual lighting installation specially created by Carlo Bernardini.
premiere
Brussels, 4 June 2024 at 7pm
European Parliament – Parlamentarium
Cultural Events in Citizen’ Garden
Season 2024 – Spring
subsequent performances
Rome, December 17, 2025, 9:00 PM
62nd Nuova Consonanza Festival
ex Mattatoio – La Pelanda
Can Beethoven be compared to electroacoustic music today? This is the first thought that led us to imagine this concert.
The solution can also be trivial, just place a Beethoven piece and any electronic piece together and that’s it! But we wanted to create a deeper relationship, a concert that truly united two genres of music, one present and one past, we wanted one to flow from the other, that music created today, with today’s means, would derive from that past that we all consider glorious but, “precisely” past, no longer belonging to our time. And we also wanted to present sonata 106, a work considered one of the giants in the history of music, as if it were an artefact from the past which, brought back to today, becomes a modern monument, an Ara Pacis of Music in a new sonic and visual space.
We won’t say whether we succeeded or not, the concert will reveal it. A concert that materializes in the present, and contains all the modalities of the present: immersive sound, in which spectators are not in front of a sound, but are “inside” the sound.
FORTE SUONO PIANO LUCE
(Loud Sound Piano Light)
Francesco Prode – piano
Luigi Ceccarelli – sound direction
Carlo Bernardini – light sculptures
Loud Sound, Piano, Light is a concert with a visual staging and an acousmatic reinterpretation of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 29, Op. 106, a true musical monument, in an ideal dialogue between past and present.
The performance of Beethoven’s masterpiece, performed in its entirety by Francesco Prode, is complemented by the visual setting by sculptor Carlo Bernardini and the “four acousmatic variations,” inserted in a precise temporal arrangement with respect to the original sonata.
An immersive spatialization that expands into the invisible dimensions of space, shaping its emptiness through the perceptual transformations of light and sound.
concert program
Luigi Ceccarelli
4 Acoustic Variations on Sonata 106 “Hammerklavier” (2024)
for electronic processing and spatialization of the piano sound
– Prelude to Allegro
– Prelude to Adagio
– Postlude to Scherzo
– Interlude in the Fugue
Ludvig Van Beethoven
Sonata No. 29, Op. 106 “Hammerklavier” (1817–1819)
– Allegro
– Scherzo. Assu Vivace
– Adagio sostenuto. Appassionato e con molto sentimento
– Largo. Allegro sospeso
The movements of the original sonata and the acoustic variations alternate in a precise order:
1 – Prelude to Allegro. 2 – Allegro. 3 – Scherzo. 4 – Prelude to Adagio. 5 – Adagio sostenuto. 6 – Postlude to Scherzo. 8 – Largo. Allegro sospeso. 9 – The fugue interlude is played approximately halfway through the Allegro sospeso, which is, indeed, in fugue form. At the end of the variation, the fugue resumes until the end.
Rewiev
Beethoven, a modern “reckless”.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 29, Op. 106 in B-flat Major is truly mind-blowing. Let’s indulge in this polite street-gang term for once. Between 1817 and 1818, Ludwig had understood (or already understood?) that there is nowhere to go, that the slogan that Luigi Nono would popularize years later, “Look for ways, not ways out,” was correct, except that the “ways” had no destination; they were magnificent paths that began and no one knew where they would end; in fact, one knew: nowhere.
In the four movements of this Sonata, also titled Hammerklavier—in the seductively bewitching Adagio sostenuto, for example, or in the scandalous, hedonistic Largo-Allegro resoluto finale with its perditory fugato interplay—there are a thousand wonderful ideas, complex harmonies, extraordinarily original and entertaining melodic devices, but none of them “resolves” in any way; everyone prefers to launch other, different ideas. This is the happy avant-garde of Ludwig van, as he is known at a certain point in A Clockwork Orange.
Things of this kind must have been thought of by two contemporary musicians in their fifties, who are leaders in their fields: Francesco Prode in all-time pianism and Luigi Ceccarelli in composition. And so they decided to create a new work from the 106, half Prode’s interpretation of the work as it is, half Ceccarelli’s newly minted, purely electronic interludes. They even gave the new work a somewhat esoteric title: Forte Suono Piano Luce. It’s currently unavailable; there was a performance in Brussels (at the European Parliament) in June 2024 and a second performance in Rome (for Nuova Consonanza) in December 2025.
It’s a discontinuous work, but in this case, given how “crazy” the source is, it can’t be considered a negative critical assessment. We hear a Prode who wants to be contemporary through Beethoven—no intentional “modernism,” a soft and lucid sound, an abandonment to a cantability that’s definitely not of the period—and a Ceccarelli who wants to speculate how Beethoven would write music if he lived in our day. Ceccarelli follows Beethoven, sometimes even citing a sketch of a theme, and bets that the contrast between a rather imperious clump of sounds and a thread of very thin, sidereal sound is precisely what his illustrious colleague from the past would do. Thus it happens that a certain “subservience” to Ludwig van is feared more in Ceccarelli, a writer of new contemporary pieces, than in Prode, a concert pianist with a question in mind: let’s see how contemporary we can be by playing very well a magically “wild” composer from two centuries ago.
Mario Gamba (Il Manifesto, March 20, 2026 – Ostinato)
