Jeffrey Siegel • Keyboard Conversations® The Power and Passion of Beethoven September 23, 2009

Juilliard-trained piano virtuoso Jeffrey Siegel, who has appeared as a soloist with the world’s great orchestras, provides an engaging concert-plus-commentary in Keyboard Conversations®. In The Power and Passion of Beethoven program, Siegel speaks with the audience about the music before performing each work. The program features Für Elise (who was she and why did the composer write this love poem for her?), the Moonlight Sonata (is it a revolutionary masterpiece?), the Piano Sonata Op. 110 (written after deafness quieted Ludwig van Beethoven’s world), and other works. New listeners enjoy Siegel’s informal and entertaining introductions to piano repertoire, while seasoned music lovers find enrichment in his erudition and wit. “In the best of all possible worlds,” writes a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reviewer, “every concert would be like one of Jeffrey Siegel's Keyboard Conversations.”

The performance of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is part of Moments of Change, a Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities multifaceted and ongoing initiative focused in 2009–2010 on the late eighteenth century (1776–1801). The performance is made possible through a partnership between the Center for the Performing Arts and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.