A feeling of raging liberation: Fabian Müller is releasing his third studio album
The German pianist Fabian Müller is releasing his third studio album, entitled “passionato”, on the Berlin Classics label amid the coronavirus shutdown. It is a statement full of musical passion that casts a fresh look at standard classical works by Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms and Rihm in the here and now. For this multiple-award-winning artist is convinced that “every generation has the right to rediscover these pieces for itself.”
VPerhaps it is this profound time of crisis that is allowing the existential power of music to shine forth with special power. Virtually overnight, artists lost their audiences – the indispensable recipients and partners to whom to communicate their artistic activity. Under these circumstances, how can artists channel their own passion or, better still, transform it? How can personal artistic fervour receive a response from outside?
With his new CD, “passionato”, Fabian Müller finds an answer to these questions that is both personal and emotional. “The word ‘passionate’ derives from the Latin word for ‘suffer’ – and for me, that is an important aspect of interpretation: a feeling of raging liberation. And in the past months, I have often enough gone through feelings of rage, injustice, almost madness.”
This makes the new album by this musician, who has already performed in New York’s Carnegie Hall, a kind of contemporary document that allows listeners to detect the sort of suffering, doubt and questioning in the works of Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms and Rihm that is currently confronting artists amid the cultural shutdown. According to Müller, while he was recording there was already a strange feeling in the air “of looming danger and the start of a quiet time. For me, every piece of music was a way of breaking free of this fear and, at the same time, an expression of great pain.”
And indeed, the Rhineland-born musician, who has just been appointed professor of piano at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln (Wuppertal campus), is likely to miss his audience even more than many other fellow musicians do: he is not just a superb pianist, but also a talented communicator and passionate educator in the musical field, and, what’s more, an enthusiastic ensemble player who has one particular heartfelt aim: “I want to share this sense of marvelling at art!”
