Recitals are a special part of the PCMS season. Featured artists often have high-profile careers as opera stars, touring soloists or as members of renowned ensembles. It can be difficult and even rare sometimes to pull a musician away from his or her “normal” routine for an intimate solo performance.  But PCMS thrives on making these appearances possible.

Leonidas Kavakos is one such musician. The career he has established for himself is one that includes being a virtuoso violinist, chamber musician, favored festival artist, composer and teacher. But “recitalist” still remains on his biography, and he has just embarked on a Beethoven sonata cycle in collaboration with pianists Emanuel Ax and Enrico Pace.

On Monday, November 7^th at the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater, Kavakos will conclude his recital with the great master’s Sonata in A Major, Op. 47, otherwise known as the “Kreutzer” Sonata.  This recital, with the latter of the two pianists, will also feature a Prokofiev sonata and a set of fabulously spectral preludes by the contemporary composer Lera Auerbach.

To whet your appetite, take a look at the video below – filmed just this past year – of Kavakos playing Beethoven’s Sonata in A Major, Op. 30 – a piece composed the same year as the “Kreutzer.”