A new 10-CD set recording of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas on period instruments challenges listeners with a different sound. Recording features Malcolm Bilson and colleagues from Cornell University's Center for Eighteenth Century Music.

Pianist Malcolm Bilson says he wants to start a revolution. And he's encouraging the revolt by offering the world of classical music a new take on one of the single most important cycles ever written for piano -- the complete cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas.

"We're playing Beethoven on the instruments for which he conceived the sonatas," Bilson said. "Serious pianists study virtually every aspect of these works in minute detail except the pianos for which Beethoven composed for and which inspired him."

Bilson, the Frederick J. Whiton Professor of Music at Cornell University, and six of his former students in the musical arts in historical performance practice doctoral program at Cornell have recorded the complete cycle on different types of fortepianos to illustrate how Beethoven's writing style changed as the instruments evolved during his lifetime.

The 10-compact disc set, "The Complete Piano Sonatas on Period Instruments," was recently released on the Swiss label Claves Records and is available at the Lincoln Hall Ticket Office at a special price of $90, including tax. The set contains the 32 piano sonatas that form the regular canon and three so-called "Bonn sonatas" (works without opus numbers) composed when Beethoven was 11 or 12.

Bilson, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences who joined the Cornell faculty in 1968, has long been a leader in the period instrument movement, having performed, in addition to Beethoven, works of Haydn and Mozart on late 18th century pianos. He is currently recording the complete Schubert sonata cylce for Hungaroton; to date three CDs have been released.

The nine pianos used in the recording were restored originals or replicas of those used by Beethoven during the nearly 30 years it took him to compose the 35 sonatas. The changes in instrument were dramatic. Beethoven's first sonata of the cycle was composed on a five octave Walter-type piano, the last five works on a 6 1/2 octave Graf-type piano.

"These early pianos can suggest very different gestures from those proferred by today's pianos and can lead the artist down quite different paths of expression," Bilson noted. "On all the pianos Beethoven would have played, the decay of tone is much more rapid than on a modern piano. Also different is the balance between base and treble and pedal usage. All of this can lead a sensitive pianist to quite new idioms."

Bilson's participation in such an undertaking is not to achieve widespread acclaim for his musicianship or ideas, but rather to deliver a fresh interpretation of the sonatas. "While these performances challenge widely accepted notions of articulation, tempo, pedalling and ornamentation, they are not meant in any way to be more authentic or more original than the best performances on modern pianos. It is our hope that they might be considered a first step toward a fresh evaluation of this repertoire, one that might open new paths of thoughts and interpretation of these signal works," he said.

This Claves label recording features the same program and artists as Bilson's September 1994 appearance at New York's Merkin Concert Hall and the free July 1994 performance on the Cornell campus. The recording was underwritten by an anonymous Cornell alumnus who attended the New York concerts. The actual recording was done in Ithaca, N.Y., and Utrecht, Holland, as these were the locations that were able to provide suitable modern replicas or restored originals from Beethoven's time.

In addition to Bilson, featured on the CD set are Tom Beghin of Belgium, a faculty member at the University of California at Los Angeles; David Breitman of Canada, a faculty member at Oberlin College; Ursula DŸtschler of Switzerland, a harpsichordist and fortepianist living in Holland; Zvi Meniker of Israel, a harpsichordist and Baroque music coach at the Mendelssohn Conservatory in Leipzig, Germany; Bart van Oort of the Netherlands, a faculty member at the Sweelinck Conservatorium in the Hague; and Andrew Willis of the United States, a faculty member at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.