Heidelberg Piano

Dear friends of piano music,  do you happen to like to ride your bike at night? As a mother of two small children, one's primary interest at night is of course to sleep, to sleep as much as possible...but the more I think about the idea, the more I like it. The calm, steady movement, the summery, intense smells of nature, the silence, the light of the moon....oh yes, at some point I have to try it, but better not alone, it's not for anxious people like me. I remember two nightly bike rides a few years ago where I almost got the above magic - but only almost. I'll tell you: Once, with friends in Münsterland, I cooked and ate rice with sauce in the middle of a forest clearing at night, which was an unbelievable adventure for me, the anxious piano mouse, in the dark, far away from civilization, with a camping stove.. .....I was fascinated. And the bike ride over forest and field paths naturally took place at night, it was pleasantly cool after the heat of the day, the exercise...

Dear friends of piano music, she must have been a gifted pianist, a fascinating woman, she is also called - which I find almost a little frightening - a Valkyrie of the piano... But what impresses me most about Teresa Carreno? A Venezuelan native, she was a child prodigy, rose to fame, was a mother of four children and married four times, with two of her husbands being brothers. She was also very popular in Germany, which could have been due, among other things, to the fact that she lived a larger part of her life in Coswig near Dresden and in Berlin. And that's the crux of the matter for me: she was an absolute celebrity in the second half of the 19th century, and today connoisseurs and lovers of 19th-century music have generally not even heard her name. One knows Fanny Hensel as Mendelssohn's sister and Clara Schumann as Robert Schumann's wife - but Teresa Carreno? We pianists don't have to kid ourselves - our work and our recognition is absolutely connected to the li...