Texas-born and British-resident pianist Kirsten Johnson has investigated unusual national repertoires of the nineteenth century; she had some success with a disc of Albanian piano music, and here she takes up two composers who, though born in Germany, later spent time in Switzerland. One is a follower, the other a forerunner, making for a pleasing and intelligent pairing. The path-breaking composers of the Romantic era left imitators in their wakes for decades afterward; some of them, like Hermann Goetz, achieved smooth ...
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Texas-born and British-resident pianist Kirsten Johnson has investigated unusual national repertoires of the nineteenth century; she had some success with a disc of Albanian piano music, and here she takes up two composers who, though born in Germany, later spent time in Switzerland. One is a follower, the other a forerunner, making for a pleasing and intelligent pairing. The path-breaking composers of the Romantic era left imitators in their wakes for decades afterward; some of them, like Hermann Goetz, achieved smooth fusions of the styles of their predecessors. The Goetz works here, a set of nine Lose Blätter (Loose Leaves) and another of six Genrebilder, Op. 13 (Genre Pictures), follow Schumann closely but also seem to trace the effect that Chopin had on Schumann. They neither peer into the wild chromatic beyond like Chopin nor cut the sharp personality profiles of Schumann's miniatures, but they are well-wrought, varied, and never dull. The six Genrebilder are accompanied in the liner notes by the...
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