Robert Brooks Carlson, pianist

Yikes.  That single word essentially captures my first—and lasting—impression of these devastatingly beautiful, terrifying etudes. I remember sitting in my studio apartment in the Winter of 2021 with my mouth agape, listening to a score-video of Zoltán Kocsis more or less eating the set for breakfast. I had just finished a long, rather hopeful, conversation…

Written as a collaboration with the father of his first fiancée, Robert Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes have long posed a great challenge to all who have crossed its path. In 1834, Schumann met and became engaged to the young pianist Ernestine von Fricken. Driven by his predictable passions, Schumann hoped to unite the two families within…

A triptych of emotional devastation and fiercely brutal physicality, Béla Bartók’s Studies, Op. 18 occupy a dark, troubled corner within the genre of the piano etude. Written in the spring of 1918, these three etudes served as a demonstration of Bartók compositional and pianistic progressivism. Due in part to a lack of immediate public approval,…

By no stretch of the imagination was Ludwig van Beethoven a stranger to suffering. It is suspected that during his lifetime Beethoven struggled with multiple health concerns, including kidney disease, liver disease, inflammatory bowel disease, alcoholism, heart arrhythmia, and Paget’s disease. Aside from his physical health, Beethoven spent many years wrapped up in a difficult…