At Close Quarters

This is the first solo CD on the new straight strung grand piano after the Barenboim releases on DG. Belgian pianist Liebrecht Vanbeckevoort says of this recording: "I first heard of Chris Maene's promising project in 2013. Daniel Barenboim had commissioned Maene to construct a modern instrument that possessed the characteristics of the instruments that had given voice to the innermost feelings of Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt during the 18th and 19th centuries.

One of the truly iconic works in the repertoire for string quartet, Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden is named after the song which has lent its theme to the second movement. At the end of Matthias Claudius’s poem, which Schubert had set as a 20-year-old in 1817, Death cradles the Maiden in his bony embrace. And her fear, in the first verse, of encountering his tomb-cold touch is mirrored by his desire for her in the second. In Schubert’s life time, death was a constant presence in everyday life and even a young person like himself would have encountered it at close quarters – in fact, his own mother had passed away when he was only 15.