Beethoven Recording Project

The first seed in the Beethoven Recording Project was sown in 1993, when the pianist Gerard Willems met piano maker Wayne Stuart who was developing an Australian grand piano at a TAFE college in Melbourne. Willems spent hours playing this innovative instrument, and was impressed with its power and clarity of sound.

Two years later, as fate would have it, Willems met television producer Brendan Ward in Sydney. While studying for a piano diploma, Ward had been surprised to find that no Australian pianist had recorded the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven, so he decided to fill in what he regarded as a missing piece of Australia’s cultural landscape. Ward heard Willems perform at a Beethoven masterclass and set out to persuade him to climb the Everest of recording projects. It took Willems many months to agree to Ward’s proposal - his one condition being to record the works on a Stuart Piano (by then Wayne Stuart’s project had moved to the University of Newcastle, north of Sydney).

Recordings of the sonatas commenced in 1997 and were completed in 2000. Ward then challenged Willems to record Beethoven’s five piano concertos and the notorious Diabelli Variations. The concerto recordings followed four years later, including filming the iconic Emperor Concerto for a DVD. All recordings were released on Australia’s premier classical music label, ABC Classics. To complete what had then become Australia’s biggest classical music recording project and the challenge thrown down by Ward ten years earlier, Gerard Willems recorded the Diabelli Variations for ABC Classics in 2010, again choosing a Stuart & Sons pianos,