Shibo, Liu
Muzio Clementi: 15 Piano Sonatas
With 15 Piano Sonatas Clementi is reclaimed beyond the pedagogues mask: virtuoso, publisher, piano maker, and above all a composer who rethinks the instrument from within, in the London where industry and art learned to share a roof. The selection of fifteen sonatas claims no completeness/ it draws an itinerary from early self-assertion to the penumbras of maturity. A classicism in motion emerges, where formal clarity coexists with harmonic risk. The programme highlights key questions of his modernity: the dialogue between contrapuntal memory and the new virtuoso idiom, the minor mode as a rhetorical arena, the expansion of sonata form beyond predictable symmetries, and the bond between notation and the pianos evolving technology. From the Sonata op. 2 no. 4 to the architectures of op. 25, the keyboard becomes a European laboratory.