Beethoven / Muller - Passionato (CD)

Following a highly personal and splendidly reviewed Brahms recording, Fabian Müller follows up with Passionato, an album centering not on a single composer, but on a "central masterwork of Western piano music": Beethoven's "Appassionata". Radiating from this hub, Müller weaves a programme that shows why he is regarded as one of Germany's most promising young pianists. It stands to reason that he is not the first pianist to apply his energies to this great work laid out on the grand scale, and Fabian Müller is well aware of this. "Each generation is entitled to rediscover these pieces for itself. Apart from that, it is simply not possible to play a piece the same way twice. So even if I know my favourite performances back to front, mine will still be the 'Appassionata' of Fabian Müller." This is the starting-point of his new album, geographically as well as musically. Having grown up between the Beethovenhaus and Schumannhaus in Bonn, he sees "much more of the Rhinelander than the Viennese" in Beethoven, flanking the Appassionata with Schumann's G minor Sonata - a work of extremes. When Schumann requires the artist to play "as fast as possible" in the first movement, then "even faster" in the coda, Müller has his own personal answer: "It is more a feeling that is too strong to be expressed in a 'normal' manner. Drop everything and play for your life. That is the key. A feeling that something is flooding out of you."