In the early nineteenth century, the house concert was the most common form of musical performance in Vienna. Professionals featured alongside aristocratic music lovers and ambitious bourgeois amateur musicians, and composers presented their works. While Beethoven’s admirers were largely counted among the Austrian and Bohemian nobility, Schubert’s circle tended to consist of literati, artists, and state officials who saw the salon as a protected space where both aesthetic and political debates could be held.

Ursina Maria Braun is familiar with unusual programmes: together with actor Thomas Loibl, she recently realised a Kafka project, as a composer she writes sophisticated chamber music, and as a soloist she masters a wide repertoire from Baroque to contemporary music. With her cello by the early-nineteenth-century Neapolitan violin maker Lorenzo Ventapane – an instrument that could well have been found in Vienna around 1830 – and the fortepiano of her piano partner Florian Birsak – a replica of a Jakob Bertsche instrument from ca. 1810 – the two musicians create a Romantic original sound in which both retain their individuality as soloists.