When Hélène Grimaud isn't playing the piano, her passion is the wolf conservancy she co-founded. It liberated her, she writes: after conceiving of it, "I had become a wild woman." That wildness may be part of what make Grimaud a great Beethoven interpreter. Hear her in Beethoven's Piano Concerto no. 5, (known as "The Emperor") Friday afternoon on Barney Sherman's program. Grimaud writes, "What makes Beethoven an extremely modern composer is this extreme vitality, the desire to never give up, and also this forever endearing, extremely touching characteristic of the music to always strive to ascend, to really get beyond the frailties and the failures of the human condition by always looking up and trying to reconcile the top and the bottom, the vertical and the horizontal. That is still the struggle of people today--this is what makes Beethoven so timeless."
