"Being a concert pianist in the 21st century is a strange profession. When I stand on another major stage, I often feel like that madman from the street next door, walking around with wide eyes and shouting about love and death, gods and devils, and the inevitable end of everything, completely alone and ridiculous. But actually, that has been the most interesting challenge for me for years now - to make the listener realize that behind all the grand romantic gestures and the language that in the era of internet messages might seem a bit too dramatic, there is a story hidden that is still entirely about you and me.
For my first album, I go through the stitches of a romantic piano repertoire that has played a major role in different phases of my life as a pianist, and I look at the small story that appears between them. The two most important pieces in the tracklist - Schumann's Humoreske and Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy - have always fascinated me by the way they balance the ironic and the serious with each other in a brilliant and poetic way, so that one cannot exist without the other. Those pieces set the tone for the entire project, which is actually a self-portrait of a man presumptuous enough to be a classical pianist in 2022."
— Sergei Redkin
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