I am a Romantic pianist. I use this term to broadly refer to the nineteenth-century aesthetic of flexibility, improvisation, and virtuosity that accompanied much of pianistic performance at that time, and that remains embedded in the textures of Romantic objects, texts, histories, and materials that continue to echo today.

 

As a Romantic pianist, I do not exclusively perform nineteenth-century music, though many of my current projects engage experimental revivals and renegotiations of material from this period. I also do not claim that any of my performances possess historical “authenticity” — or that they fall under a revival and extension of the (earlier) HIP movement’s hopeful umbrella — but acknowledge that the essence of Romantic art and contexts inspires my own modern interpretations and performances as channeled through no one’s hands or spirit but my own. 

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My interest in this period is not fanciful, accidental, or idealistic. I actively think about the impact that Romantic aesthetic ideologies have had on subsequent generations of artists, and the way their afterlives have resonated in culture beyond the academy and the art institution. Constructs such as genius, talent, inspiration, intimacy, and expressive depth are more alive than ever today, reverberating through cultural discourse and clandestinely shaping movements, infrastructures, and systems of artistic creation far beyond the bubble of classical music. In some ways, they have transformed into prerequisites for aesthetic marketability at large. Thus, I am committed to sustaining critical practices and open discussions that interrogate the calcified assumptions that have shadowed modern art and performance — about the tragic artist, the performer's obligatory vulnerability, the composer’s immovable authority, the shiny monument’s eternity — and the way they systematize the erasure of labor, mediation, and material creation. Ultimately, I aim to challenge unquestioned and ubiquitous expressions, interpretations, and promotions of broadly Romantic art in favor of free, daring, intelligent experiments.

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At the heart of Romanticism lies one of its most persistent contradictions: the desire to capture an extraordinary, unrepeatable moment of inspiration and transform it into something habitual, replicable, and transmissible. This aspiration — at once seductive and impossible — continues to animate performance culture. I am skeptical of the notion that such intensity can emerge unmediated, as a kind of confessional outpouring simply “overheard,” to borrow John Stuart Mill’s phrase. Performance is never free of friction; context intrudes, bodies get tired, rooms resonate with debris and messiness, attention refuses to obey. I treat these conditions not as failures to be violently overcome, but as unavoidable, guaranteed, if raw, material to work with.

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As a performer, I accept these imperfections and risks, and leave room for the possibility that a performance might fail or falter — or that it might offer something other than transcendence: alternatively, a new thought, a familiar memory, a provocation, a moment of resistance, an unexpected detour or even boredom.

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Ultimately, I am committed to multiplicity rather than resolution. I resist singular readings, fixed truths, and closed systems of value. I read scores alongside the material, social, and visual worlds that shaped them, without claiming to exhaust their meaning or justify every interpretive choice. My wider work embraces idiosyncrasy, experimentation, and informed deviation — not as gestures of rebellion for their own sake, but as an insistence that art remain alive and unstabilized. For me, the task of the "Romantic" pianist is not to feed an impossibility, but to engage its contradictions openly, critically, and creatively.