This is domestic music, and the instruments of the day were scaled to such private performances. Modern instruments are designed to project, and Ibragimova and Tiberghien's readings were conceived to do just that: first in the Wigmore Hall, where they performed this cycle, then at the concert hall of the Wyastone Estate in Monmouth, their recording venue. Two contrasting conceptions of the same music. Faust and Ibragimova are similar musicians in many ways, equally adept on modern and period instruments and with an exploratory approach to everything they play. Ibragimova's Mozart was on modern instruments; Faust, on the other hand, plays her 1704 'Sleeping Beauty' Stradivari, while Alexander Melnikov's fortepiano is a copy of a 1795 Anton Walter.
