Being a concert pianist in the 21st century is a strange profession. Going out on another big stage I often feel like this crazy guy from the next street, who's going around, wide-eyed, yelling about love and death, gods and devils, and the inevitable end of it all, being all alone and ridiculous. But for many years this has actually been the most interesting challenge of it for me - to make the listener realize that behind all the big romantic gestures and the language that may seem a little too dramatic in the era of internet messaging there is a story that is still totally about you and me. For my first record, I'm going through the staples of a romantic piano repertoire that played a huge role on different stages of my life as a pianist, looking at the little story that appears between them. The two main pieces in the tracklist - Schumann's Humoreske and Schubert's Wanderer-Fantasy - always fascinated me with the way in which they balance the ironic and the serious in a brilliant and poetic way, so that one cannot exist without the other. Those pieces set the tone for the whole project which is basically a self-portrait of a guy who is presumptuous enough to be a classical pianist in 2022. (Sergei Redkin)