Last season, the pianist Orli Shaham decided to go for a Grand Slam. Her intended feat, in this case, would be to perform all of the Beethoven Piano Concertos within a single season. There are five of them, and for Orli, just one remained elusive, the Concerto Number Five, the venerable Emperor.

Orli gets bonus points for throwing in a related piece of music - Beethoven's Triple Concerto - a piece for violin, cello, piano and orchestra.

We'll find out about Orli's fascination with the Beethoven Piano Concertos, in this conversation with Gail Wein.

GAIL WEIN: What's the attraction for you to the Beethoven Piano Concertos?

ORLI SHAHAM: They're like a Mount Everest for pianists. This is something we all have to climb at some point. You play the first and second ones very early on in your life, and you play the third one early on in your career - that's the one you tend to perform at the beginning - and you work your way up to the fourth and the fifth. For me really the fourth concerto is the pinnacle, it's an incredible piece of music. Eventually you get there, having played all five, and you feel like, okay, I've got my package. You can't play all 27 Mozart Concerti, in a season, you just can't. But you can do all five of the Beethoven - five, plus maybe one more if you consider the Triple Concerto, that's sort of a manageable mountain to climb. And I think that's why some pianists want to do all of them.

GW: Why all five concerti in one season? That sounds like a pretty daunting challenge.

OS: I love delving into composers. I love living in a composer's mind for some period of time, and doing a number of different works from a number of different times in the composers' life is a really good way to do that. So doing the five piano concerti in one season I thought would be a great way to really just spend a season with Beethoven and examine him through different times of his life and through different lenses of mine. And of course I've had different relationships with the different concerti over the years, so I thought it would be nice to put them all together.

GW: The Concerto Number 5, Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, seems to be the most towering of them all. What sets that one apart from the others?

OS: Interestingly enough, because the Emperor Concerto has a name, it's the most frequently performed. When I was trying to put together a season where I'd do all five Beethoven concerti, I offered all five to any orchestra that invited me that season. Nobody wanted the Emperor, because, I think, it had just been performed too much. I thought, I'm putting together this Grand Slam of concerti, and this one base, my home run, is never going to happen.

But the good news is that Beethoven wrote this bonus concerto, the Triple Concerto. So I figured, if I can't get the Emperor Concerto programmed in the same season with the other four, I could at least get the Triple Concerto in the season. So I managed to work that out, and I felt slightly vindicated in my grand slam attempt.

GW: You got the bonus points.

OS: I always liked extra credit when I was a kid. Because I knew even if you missed one of the questions, the extra credit would push you up.

GW: Tell me about the Triple Concerto. It's chamber music, AND it's a concerto. How does that work?

OS: What I love about the Triple Concerto is that it actually plays to almost all of the things that pianists do. I love being a pianist because it's many careers in one. I get to be a soloist, being on stage all by myself, I get to be a chamber musician, playing in small intimate groups, and I get to perform as soloist with orchestras, playing in front of a large group. The Triple Concerto includes all of that. There are solo piano moments, there's solo chamber music moments, where it's really just the three soloists playing and the orchestra is sitting back and enjoying itself. And then there's a real collaboration with the orchestra in which the soloists are imitating passages back and forth with the woodwinds, and such. And I think that's part of what makes Beethoven's genius. Of course he was a pianist, and he knew that these are the elements that make up a pianist's life. I think that's why he was able to do a concerto like this so successfully.

GW: I can't think of too many other pieces that are like that.

OS: There are a few others. Earlier, in the baroque era, this was the typical way of doing a concerto. And there are a few other examples here and there, but I find that the Triple Concerto in many ways is the most effective combination of chamber music with orchestra.

GW: It is a fantastic piece.

OS: Ah, it's so much fun to play, too.

GW: Are you going to try for this grand slam in a future season? Or do you maybe have another grand slam up your sleeve of another sort?

OS: At the moment I'm looking for my "white whale," which is an orchestra that wants to perform the Emperor Concerto. Because it was so hard getting an orchestra to program it last season, I'm now offering it to everybody. I'm still performing with these orchestras, but they always say, no, we can't do the Emperor, we just did it. So instead I'm doing all sorts of other repertoire. But I still feel like Captain Ahab!"

GW: Orli, thank you very much.

OS: My pleasure.