Ronald Brautigam is one of the leading pianists of his generation, and one of the few who attain a top-notch performance level on modern as well as on historical instruments. As a pupil of the legendary Rudolf Serkin, he made himself a name as one of the major interpreters of Classical and early Romantic repertoire. Then he discovered historical performance practice in the mid-1980s. Apart from having the chance to study original manuscripts and compare editions, he was fascinated to be able to plunge into the composer’s original “sound world”. The list of Brautigam’s releases is impressive, including complete cycles of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. He is currently studying and performing the works of an almost unknown German-Dutch composer: Wilhelm Wilms, an unjustly forgotten contemporary of Beethoven. For his fourth appearance at the Ruhr Piano Festival, Brautigam will frame Wilms’s set of variations with beautiful works by Schubert: the Four Impromptus, op. 90, and Schubert’s “swan song”, the last Sonata in B Flat Major.