Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3 - Piano Sonatas Nos. 14 & 32 Fazil Say

• 1 I. Allegro con brio 15:13
• 2 II. Largo 08:06
• 3 III. Rondo: Allegro 08:48
• 4 I. Maestoso - Allegro con brio ed appassionato 09:17
• 5 II. Arietta: Adagio molto semplice e cantabile 15:35
• 6 I. Adagio sostenuto 07:33
• 7 II. Allegretto 02:08
• 8 III. Presto agitato 06:56
• Total Runtime 01:13:36

Info for Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3 - Piano Sonatas Nos. 14 & 32

With his extraordinary pianistic talents, Fazil Say has been touching audiences and critics alike for more than 25 years. His outstanding technique very quickly enabled him to master the so-called warhorses of the repertoire with sovereign ease.

Fazil Say has played with all the famous American and European orchestras and numerous leading conductors. In addition, he also appears regularly in chamber music: for many years he performed as a duo with the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and among his other notable partners is the Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta.

His recordings of works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin and Stravinsky have been highly praised by the critics and have won several prizes, among them three ECHO Klassik awards. Following several recordings dedicated to his own compositions, Fazil is returning to core classical repertoire, through three works of Beethoven, all in keys of C: the 'Moonlight' and Opus 111 sonatas, as well as the third Piano concerto, with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gianandrea Noseda.

“Say and Gianandrea Noseda are hard-hitting radicals when it comes to Beethoven and their recording of the Third Piano Concerto is one of most startling performances on disc...this is very much a forward-looking account, epic in scale, darkly poetic...revealing the work to be very much the equal in scope and intensity of the concertos that followed.” (The Guardian)

“Fleet-fingered, ultra-articulated playing from Say, stopping just short of sounding mannered. His own cadenza in the Concerto's first movement builds impressive continuity into the coda.” (BBC Music Magazine))

Fazil Say, piano
Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra
Gianandrea Noseda, conductor

Fazil Say
When the German composer Aribert Reimann discovered the 16-year-old Fazıl Say’s fast-developing artistry on a trip to the latter’s hometown of Ankara, Turkey, he exclaimed to the American pianist David Levine: “You absolutely must hear him – this boy plays like a devil.” Say had his first piano lessons from Mithat Fenmen, who had himself studied with Alfred Cortot in Paris. Perhaps sensing how talented his pupil was, Fenmen asked the boy to improvise every day on themes to do with his daily life before going on to complete his essential piano exercises and studies. This contact with free creative processes and forms is seen as the source of the immense improvisatory talent and the aesthetic outlook that have made Fazıl Say the pianist and composer he is today.

From 1987 onwards, Fazıl Say fine-tuned his skills as a classical pianist with David Levine, first at the Musikhochschule Robert Schumann in Düsseldorf and later in Berlin. This formed the aesthetic basis for his Mozart and Schubert interpretations, in particular, leading to victory at the Young Concert Artists International competition in New York in 1994. Since then he has played with all of the renowned American and European orchestras and numerous leading conductors, building up a multifaceted repertoire ranging from Bach, through the Viennese Classics (Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven) and the Romantics, right up to contemporary music, including his own piano compositions.

He has been commissioned to write music for, among others, the Salzburg Festival, the WDR, the Dortmund Konzerthaus and the Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern festivals. His work includes compositions for solo keyboard and chamber music, as well as solo concertos and large-scale orchestral works, such as the 2011 Clarinet Concerto for Sabine Meyer inspired by the life and work of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam.

Say is a passionate advocate of music as a path to social change, in his native Turkey and beyond. “I strongly believe that art and music will form a bridge between Western and Eastern cultures, blending and transforming these cultures,” he stated in a speech for the 38th Congress of the International Federation of Human Rights in Istanbul, 2013.

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