On a Beethoven trail: Pianist Anand Seshadri launches his ambitious 32‑sonata project

Anand Seshadri’s recital at the Museum Theatre marked not just a concert, but the beginning of his Beethoven 32 Project — an extended undertaking to perform the composer’s complete piano sonatas over the coming years. Rather than announcing the ambition with grand rhetoric, he allowed the idea to reveal itself through music and reflection. The recital felt less like a launch and more like the opening page of a book. 

Designed as a lecture-recital, the programme moved between explanation and performance. Trained in the UK, the U.S., Hungary and Germany, Anand Seshadri brings to his performances a dual perspective shaped by concert practice and composition. Before each work, he briefly outlined structural ideas, tracing how motifs evolve and how emotional momentum accumulates across movements. These spoken moments altered the audience’s listening posture. One began to hear transitions more actively, anticipating shifts in harmony or texture that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

Anand prefers the term ‘Art Music’ to the more familiar ‘Western classical music’, describing it as a continuum that connects works across centuries rather than a fixed historical category. In conversation after the recital, he observed that Chennai audiences, shaped by deep philosophical and musical traditions, respond strongly when performances offer intellectual engagement alongside aesthetic experience. “People don’t just want to hear a piano,” he said. “They want to experience a journey.”

The programme opened with Johannes Brahms’ Intermezzi, Op.117 (Nos.1 and 3), music often described as autumnal reflections. Anand approached them with restraint, allowing phrases to unfold without rhetorical exaggeration. The sound world he created emphasised inwardness rather than outward drama. The Ballade in G minor, Op.118 No.3, introduced a darker emotional register, its rhythmic firmness balanced by carefully shaped melodic lines.

Franz Schubert’s ‘Impromptu’ in C minor extended the contemplative atmosphere. Having explained the work’s structural flow beforehand, Anand allowed repetition to function as a transformation rather than a recurrence. Technical assurance remained evident, but it never dominated the musical narrative.

After the interval came Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata, Op.57, the centrepiece of the evening. Anand has lived with Beethoven’s sonatas for over 15 fifteen years, and he describes undertaking the complete cycle now as an opportunity to “grow with the music over the coming decade. Each sonata teaches something different, both as a performer and as a composer.”

Anand Seshadri’s recital combined performance with explanation.
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Often referred to as the ‘New Testament’ of piano literature, the 32 sonatas chart Beethoven’s artistic evolution. Anand spoke of how the early works foreground virtuosity, the middle-period sonatas demand a deeper synthesis of technique and musical insight, while the late works require an expanded imagination of sound and colour. The cumulative demands, he noted, are what make the cycle intellectually and physically formidable: no single sonata can stand in for the whole.

His interpretation of the Appassionata reflected this long view. The opening movement carried contained volatility rather than overt aggression, its tensions unfolding with architectural clarity. Anand describes the work as a “passionate musical hurricane,” yet his performance emphasised control and emotional continuity. 

The recital concluded with Kaleidoscope Reflection, one of Anand’s original compositions. Positioned after Beethoven, the work functioned as a contemporary reflection rather than a stylistic contrast. Shifting textures and harmonic colours suggested an artiste actively absorbing historical influence while speaking in a personal voice. Anand describes his dual identity as pianist and composer as mutually sustaining: analysing Beethoven’s musical ‘DNA’ informs interpretation, while performing the sonatas deepens his understanding of the piano’s physical and expressive possibilities as a composer. He says, “On stage even a 200-year-old sonata should feel like a premiere.”

Anand Seshadri’s recital invited audiences into the act of listening rather than positioning them as passive observers.
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

In Chennai’s evolving cultural landscape, such projects signal a quiet expansion of listening cultures. Western art music occupies a smaller but increasingly curious space within the city’s classical ecosystem. By combining performance with explanation, Anand’s lecture-recital format lowers entry barriers without simplifying complexity, inviting audiences into the act of listening rather than positioning them as passive observers.

If the Beethoven 32 Project continues in this spirit, it promises to be less a series of concerts than an evolving conversation, unfolding across years, repertoire and experience.