New Arts International

The album brings together Kreisleriana and Kinderszenen, two of Schumann’s most significant piano works—both composed in the same year, 1838. Paolo Giacometti performs these works on an original, restored Érard piano from the exact same year, creating a unique historical and emotional resonance between instrument and repertoire.
Giacometti blends historical sensitivity with interpretive freedom, redefining Romantic repertoire for today’s listeners.
Kinderszenen is deeply personal to Giacometti: one of the first works he played as a child, and now revisited as a father of four—creating a full-circle emotional arc.

What does it mean for Schumann’s Kreisleriana to be Romantic? Is it the violent contrasts, the mercurial shifts in mood, the fragmentary architecture, the raw and unfiltered expression? Is it the breathtaking lyricism? Or is it the spectre of the tormented kapellmeister Kreisler haunting this work that dissolves the boundaries between music, literature, and psychological portraiture? Acclaimed virtuoso Paolo Giacometti brings both poetry and psychoanalysis to Kreisleriana and Kinderszenen, performing them on a resplendent 1838 Érard born in the very year these works first saw the light.

Schumann 1838