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"I’ve always been suspicious of straight paths and predetermined trajectories," says pianist Carmen Stefanescu, and indeed her own path is anything but straightforward: she was accepted as a junior student at the Aachen University of Music at the age of 10, won numerous prizes at competitions – and then unexpectedly broke away from her obviously predetermined career path: Instead of pursuing her promising career as a pianist, she went on tour around the world as a keyboard player with various bands. It was not until ten years later that she returned to classical music, graduating with honours from the Cologne University of Music with a degree in piano. In Leipzig, she performed with soloists from the Gewandhaus, the MDR Symphony Orchestra and the Sinfonia London, discovered her love of song accompaniment and was successful as a duo at the International Grieg Competition in Oslo, before her path led her back to Cologne, where she recorded her first album Kaleidoscope of Life, among other things. Carmen Stefanescu states: "Good music touches the soul, no matter what genre it belongs to: "My soul is touched by Debussy, Poulenc, Brahms and Chopin, but also Chick Corea and Bill Evans." She has always been particularly moved by sung music, not least because she has worked so often with singers and one of her most important teachers was song accompanist Irwin Gage, who worked intensively with her to bring out the vocal quality from this inherently percussive instrument. The programme of the album "is full to bursting with my life", says the pianist in conversation with Robert Nemeczek; because all the pieces have a very personal story behind them – whether it’s a childhood memory of the Romanian song Frică m-ie că mor ca mâine, which Maria Tanăse, also known as the "Romanian Piaf", who performed in Stefanescu’s great-grandmother’s beer garden in Romania during the Second World War, or Poulenc’s Mélancolie, which accompanied her through difficult times.