Recordings

One of the defining hallmarks of the Romantic Period was its emphasis on the importance of piano music.  At the turn of the 19th century, musicians had developed and expanded the formal classical vocabulary into a richly fluent and complex musical language, and were making bold discoveries about the piano’s potential for evoking emotional responses from audiences. The prevailing fond of artistic inspiration that was forming at the time was extremely personal, but it would take more than just compositional experimentation to truly transform music; what was needed was the virtuoso! As luck would have it, the year 1810 saw an interesting coincidence in the birth of not one but two extraordinarily gifted virtuosos, namely Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann.