Arcadi Volodos had his first contact with the music of Catalan composer Frederic Mompou when he was studying in Madrid with the legendary piano professor Dmitri Bashkirov in the mid-1990s. But it was only in 2013, when he had become an acclaimed virtuoso, that Volodos returned to Mompou’s intimate, impressionistically shimmering music and devoted an entire album to that repertoire, which he released to worldwide acclaim. Mompou’s cycle with the paradoxical title Música callada (“silent music”) has an almost spiritual meaning for Volodos. “This music does not sound as if it had ever been composed, but, instead, wrested from eternity, as if it had already existed in the Spheres before and after Creation. […] These brief pieces are like frozen moments where time and space melt into one. Mompou’s Mùsica Callada enables us to transcend the barriers of our own world.” The great pianist Alicia de Larrocha was the first artist to make the piano music of Mompou and Albéniz better known beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula. On the occasion of his 19th performance at the Ruhr Piano Festival, Kissin pays homage to the 100th anniversary of de Larrocha’s birth.