Details: Stefania Neonato is involved in both historical performance practice on historical instruments as well as the modern piano playing tradition. Christine Busch can be heard as a soloist and chamber musician with both the modern and baroque violin in concerts worldwide. The fortepiano used for the present recordings come from the Viennese workshop of Nannette Streicher and has the serial number 1060. Ludwig van Beethoven himself was good friends with the couple and played their instruments. The three selected sonatas on this album span a period of fourteen years, from 1798 (Op. 12/1 and 3) to 1812, the year of the composition of Op. 96 - two years before the piano used here was completed. Nannette Streicher opened her piano workshop together with her husband and her brother in Vienna at the end of the 18th century. They built well over a thousand instruments, of which only around forty fortepianos have survived to this day.