17. Mar

Fabian Müllers new album is here: Passionato

The new album by pianist Fabian Müller is here!
After a very personal and excellently reviewed Brahms recording, Fabian Müller follows up with 'Passionato', an album that does not focus on a single composer but on a "central masterpiece of Western piano music": Beethoven's 'Appassionata'. Starting from this centre, Müller weaves a programme that shows why he is considered one of Germany's most promising young pianists.
That he is not the first pianist to dedicate himself to this great work in grand style goes without saying, and Fabian Müller is aware of this. "Every generation has the right to rediscover these pieces for itself. Apart from that, it is simply not possible to perform a piece twice in the same way. So even if I know my favourite performances inside out, mine will always be Fabian Müller's 'Appassionata'." This is the starting point of his new album, both geographically and musically. Having grown up between the Beethoven-Haus Bonn and the Schumannhaus Bonn, he sees in Beethoven "much more the Rhinelander than the Viennese" and flanks the Appassionata with Schumann's G minor Sonata - a work of extremes. When Schumann demands that the artist play "as fast as possible" in the first movement, then "even faster" in the coda, Müller has his own personal response: "It is rather a feeling that is too strong to express in a 'normal' way. Dropping everything and playing for one's life. That's the key. A feeling that something is pouring out of you."
Fabian Müller has already proved that he knows how to make Brahms' piano music his own. His two rhapsodies give the pianist the impression "that they could melt through anything; because they are always so burning, penetrating and piercing". As a third counterpart to Beethoven, alongside Schumann and Brahms, he chooses a composer whose work represents another strand of his musical identity. Wolfgang Rihm and his Piano Piece No. 5 "Tombeau" shed another ray of light on the musical interpretation of human emotional experience: "Beethoven combines emotion with a very strong structure, Rihm with enormous ruthlessness, Schumann with songlike rapture and Brahms something else again."

With Passionato, Fabian Müller presents an album that takes the interpretation of Romantic piano music to a new level. It is meant to be authentic, on a human level, like Fabian himself. At the age of 15, he was already studying in Pierre-Laurent Aimard's piano class in Cologne, played in Germany's major concert halls and has since won prizes at the ARD Music Competition and the "Ton und Erklärung" competition. It is striking that Fabian Müller speaks so clearly about music as he plays it. "After all, understanding a work means recognising its appeal and being able to imagine what makes it worth listening to. I think everyone can benefit enormously from that. And that's why I will never stop loving music. And most importantly, never stop sharing it with as many people as possible."