Research & Piano Performance Practice

Since her doctorate in Kai Köpp’s research project on 19th century instructive music editions in Bern (2014-18), Camilla started listening systematically to piano rolls and early acoustic by pianists still educated during that era and became increasingly infatuated with their playing. As the focus of her dissertation was Lisztian interpretation practice, she focused on recordings by Liszt students like Eugen d’Albert, Frederic Lamond, or Arthur Friedheim.

In 2014, she came back to regularly performing on fortepianos of the early 19th century, an interest she had developed while playing museum concerts on the Beethovenhaus Bonn’s Conrad Graf of 1828 and Thomas Broadwood of 1817 (1999-2005). From 2019 onwards, her experience with a different fortepianos further intensified as she had daily access to replicas and originals of historically important instruments from the time of 1785-1835 at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium (built by Chris Maene) and had the chance to regularly discuss related performance practice topics with Tom Beghin.

Currently, Camilla is focusing on the fascinating Hungarian Liszt student and eccentric Josef Weiss (Weisz/Weiß): she first encountered his outstanding playing in 2016 when her Bern research group was notified that his long-lost piano rolls with the Liszt b minor sonata resurfaced as part of a Philipps-DUCA roll collection at the University of Frankfurt. She is now working on making his scattered and fragmentary estate and his recordings accessible to a wider circle of musicians and scholars. Other topics she is currently working on include Carl Czerny’s lifelong relationship with Franz Liszt as well as the transfer of Johannes Brahms’ music and piano performance practice to the USA at the end of the 19th century.

An active pianist, she is incorporating stylistic means from the “golden age of piano” into her own playing.