In this new recording, Aurelia Visovan presents Carl Czerny's Grande Sonate in D minor to the public for the very first time on fortepiano, alongside Schubert's dramatic Sonata in C minor, D 958, composed in the same year.
Franz Schubert and Carl Czerny two contemporaries, living in the same city, both tightly connected to Beethoven in their own way. Schubert ascended into glory, being regarded nowadays as one of the leading composers of Western music history; Czerny, albeit a highly prolific composer and very cherished pupil of Beethoven, remained in the popular recollection mostly as a teacher and creator of numerous study works of little musical value.
Czerny's Grande Sonate in D minor, by far the longest out of his eleven sonatas, was written immediately after Beethoven's death and can be regarded as an attempt to reach the realms of the Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata: with its seven movements and spectacular technical challenges, the work is a long-forgotten masterpiece which deserves its place among the great oeuvres of the 19th century.
Aurelia Visovan is an internationally acclaimed Romanian pianist, harpsichordist and fortepianist, winner of the 2019 edition of the Musica Antiqua Competition Brugge (fortepiano). She regularly performs concerts and recitals on both historical instruments and modern piano, in halls such as the Groer Saal of the Berliner Philharmonie, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, BOZAR, Auditorio de Zaragoza, Brucknerhaus Linz, Die Glocke Bremen, Casa da Musica Porto, Musikverein Vienna, Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest, and in festivals such as Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Festivals de Wallonie, to name a few In 2021 she earned a doctoral degree from the Music Academy in Cluj-Napoca, with a thesis focused on historical keyboard instruments. Viosovan is currently a piano professor at the Nuremberg University of Music, Germany.
