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

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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. Nor do I claim that any of my performances possess historical “authenticity,” or that they fall under a revival and extension of the earlier "HIP" (Historically Informed Performance) movement’s hopeful umbrella. Rather, the materials and contradictions of Romantic art inform modern interpretations channeled through no one’s hands or spirit but my own.

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As a scholar and artist also invested in fashion as both a body-shaping system and a framework for artistic possibility, I think of repertory much as I think of a wardrobe: as an accumulated collection of materials whose meanings emerge through use, combination, repetition, alteration, and the bodies that inhabit and internalize them. I strongly challenge the treatment of canonical repertoire as masterworks under glass—a practice that still overwhelmingly persists in institutionally “serious” spaces, creating a reverential distance from the conditions that once gave the music texture. In performance, I want to wear history: to place scores back into contact with bodies, clothing, objects, literature, technologies, rooms, landscapes, and other works, allowing familiar music to enter unfamiliar constellations. The same piece can therefore recur across radically different programs, just as the same garment acquires another character through a new ensemble. Historical knowledge does not fix the work in place but illuminates more of its material, philosophical, and sonic intersections. My performances use that material to construct environments in which repertory can once again feel contingent, tactile, intimate, strange, and alive.
 

My interest in this period is neither fanciful nor accidental. I actively think about the impact Romantic aesthetic ideologies have had on subsequent generations of artists and the ways their afterlives have resonated far beyond the academy and the art institution. Constructs such as genius, talent, inspiration, intimacy, and expressive depth remain remarkably alive, reverberating through cultural discourse and clandestinely shaping movements, infrastructures, and systems of artistic creation beyond classical music. In some contexts, they have effectively transformed into prerequisites for aesthetic marketability. I am therefore committed to critical practices and open discussions that interrogate the calcified assumptions shadowing modern art and performance: the tragic artist, the performer’s obligatory vulnerability, the composer’s immovable authority, the shiny monument’s eternity, and the ways such myths obscure labor, mediation, and material creation. I want instead to make room for free, daring, intelligent experiments with the materials Romanticism has left behind.

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Virtuosity, for me, names an embodied form of knowledge. I remain invested in a Romantic ideal that contemporary classical performance has often preserved as spectacle while thinning out as practice: the prolonged absorption of music into the body until technique, memory, imagination, and responsiveness can operate with extraordinary freedom rather than allegiance to dogma. I am interested in what happens after a score has been practiced past mere execution, when it can respond to a particular instrument, acoustic, audience, mood, or moment and emerge differently each time. Historical research adds grain to that intimacy: the technologies, disciplines, injuries, fantasies, clothing, and ideologies that shaped virtuosity matter precisely because they shaped pianistic bodies. I want both that material history and the unstable immediacy those bodies can produce at the instrument.

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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. That aspiration still animates performance culture. I am skeptical of intensity imagined as unmediated confession, simply “overheard,” to borrow John Stuart Mill’s phrase. Performance is never free of friction: context intrudes, bodies tire, rooms resonate with debris and messiness, attention refuses to obey. I treat those conditions as material rather than failure.

As a performer, I leave room for the possibility that a performance might falter—or offer something other than transcendence: a new thought, a familiar memory, a provocation, a moment of resistance, an unexpected detour, 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 work embraces idiosyncrasy, experimentation, and informed deviation 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 inhabit its contradictions openly, critically, and creatively.