It was in 1774 that Joseph Haydn had his first set of solo keyboard sonatas published and that Mozart first tackled the genre. The five sonatas presented here all date from 1773-1783, a decade that saw the fortepiano swiftly become the preferred medium for a new style of keyboard writing, to the detriment of the harpsichord. All that remained was to find the instrument to speak this new language: the late eighteenth-century German piano on which Jérôme Hantaï is recording offers us a chance to hear a unique, expressive, cantabile voice.