The critically acclaimed pianist Zhang Zuo has performed all of Beethoven’s concertos except one: His No. 2.
This weekend, she will check that box when she performs with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra as it welcomes José Luis Gomez to his inaugural season with the orchestra. Concerts are on Friday, Sept. 22, and Sunday, Sept. 24, at Tucson Music Hall.
Beethoven’s Second completes Zhang’s journey into the composer’s concerto repertoire. This weekend will be the first time she will perform the Second in concert.
“After this I will have all five concertos ready and I will know all five (Beethoven) concertos,” said Zhang, who goes by the nickname Zee Zee, given to her when the China native came to the United States in her late teens to study at Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Her American classmates and teachers called her by her initials because they couldn’t pronounce her name, she said.
Zhang, who grew up mostly in Germany, has been working on the No. 2 for about eight months, practicing on the Steinway grand piano in the living room of her Berlin home in between touring mostly in Europe.
“Every time I come back to it, it’s almost like it has settled in me a little better,” she said during a phone interview from home last week. “And it brings me some perspective of the piece.”
One thing she has learned: The Beethoven 2 is complex in its simplicity. It has fewer notes and it’s written with such economy of scale that it’s a beast. The hardest part about it is bringing out its purity, she said.
“It’s really difficult to make its design and phrasing and nuances melt into one piece” Zhang, 28, explained. “The piece itself is really simple. It has fewer notes, but it is so refined. For me, I think musically this is way more difficult than Rachmaninoff No. 2 because it’s so refined. It has such fewer notes.”
So is the award-winning pianist, whose honors include taking home first place in the first International Piano Competition in China, ready for the challenge of her Beethoven 2 debut?
Are you ever really ready? she asks back.
“We have a saying that an artist never learns a piece until they perform it,” she said. “Now it doesn’t matter how much I practice it, how much I memorize it, how much I listen to it, you never know until you hear it with your audience.”
