Daniel Barenboim is to return to the Festival Hall to play all five of Beethoven's piano concertos in four concerts over one long weekend.

His Beethoven sonata marathon last year attracted more than 20,000 classical music fans to the South Bank.

The concerto series, in January 2010, will be all the more remarkable because he will also by conducting his orchestra, the Berlin Staatskapelle, at the same time.

Speaking to The Times, Barenboim, 66, said that he was hoping to recapture the atmosphere of his sonata series, which took place over eight sold-out concerts last February and sparked unprecedented demand from the public. “It was difficult to leave London so many months ago,” he said. “We had a communion with the public, and I think many of the audience came to most of the concerts, if not all of them, so there was a real feeling of a cycle. I hope to achieve some of that with these performances.”

A host of celebrity admirers, among them Sir Ian McKellen, David Gilmour and Sir Trevor McDonald, were spotted in the audiences. So great was the demand to hear the 32 sonatas that the Southbank Centre had to insert extra rows of seating on the recital platform, and install a screen outside the hall so that those without tickets could watch a live relay.

Barenboim said that he would be relying on his long relationship with the Staatskapelle to see him through the challenge of conducting the concertos at the same time as playing the solo part. “I would not want do this with an orchestra that does not know me so well,” he admitted.

His four-concert programmes partner the box-office-friendly Beethoven with the far more forbidding soundscapes of Arnold Schoenberg, the radical Austrian composer credited with inventing 12-tone composition, a technique that avoids traditional harmony. More than 50 years after his death, Schoenberg's dense and intricate music still struggles to attract a mass audience.

“I shall do my very best to persuade them,” Barenboim said. “And I think if the public gives you the trust that they've given me after so many years, in a way I have a duty to bring to them what I think is important. What's interesting about Beethoven and Schoenberg is that both composers managed to sum up everything that was written before them and at the same time point the way to the future.”

Marshall Marcus, head of music at the Southbank Centre, said: “There are not many artists like Daniel Barenboim who can do this type of performance, playing the five piano concertos in a matter of days and side by side conducting some of the most complex music ever written. I see these concerts as a tremendous challenge.”

Last year Barenboim refused to allow his recitals to be broadcast. Yesterday he suggested that he might now be more flexible. “Maybe for this it can be done. I would be very pleased.”

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