Ballades

Pianist Grigory Sokolov sinks his huge paws and eager jaws into the composer’s F minor Sonata and Four Ballades, pushing the music’s structural parameters and huge sonorities to the proverbial max. Listeners expecting a semblance of classical propriety à la Solomon and Kempff (in the Sonata) or Gould and Michelangeli (in the Ballades) probably will cringe at Sokolov’s outsized rubatos, steroid-induced dynamic contrasts, and highly idiosyncratic tempo fluctuations.

Yundi - Chopin - Ballades, Berceuse & Mazurkas (2016) {Mercury Classics-Deutsche Grammophon}
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© 2016 Mercury Classics / Deutsche Grammophon | 00289 481 2443
Classical / Romantic / Piano

Yundi, the Chinese dazzling pianist acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal for his - poetic depth and patrician elegance - continues his award-winning exploration of the works of Chopin with a new recording of the Ballades, and by embarking on a major international tour. If precedent is a guide, both are expected to cause massive excitement among his fans. For his new all-Chopin recording, Yundi performs the Opus 17 set of four Mazurkas, the Berceuse (Op 57), and all four Ballades. The latter works were composed between 1831 and 1842, and contain some of the composers most operatic writing, as well as his most challenging technical demands.

The new album by Erik T. Tawaststjerna will be released on the 8th of April. He has taught a number of pianists who have recorded for Alba, for example Janne Mertanen, Risto-Matti Marin, Tuula Hällström, Katriina Korte and Emil Holmström.

The pianist Anna Vinnitskaya has built up an impressive discography since her victory at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 2007: Bach, Brahms, Ravel, and of course the Russian composers with whom she has been familiar since her childhood in Novorossiysk, then her studies with Evgeni Koroliov. She has now made her first Chopin recording, coupling the four Ballades, a cross between the miniature and the sonata, with the four Impromptus he composed at different periods of his life, between 1835 and 1842.

This Da Vinci Classics album comprises some of the most famous and beloved masterpieces not only among Chopin’s works, but also in the entire piano literature. True, piano literature without Chopin is hardly imaginable; but Chopin without his Ballades, his Scherzos and his Sonatas would not be Chopin. The programme is composed by four shorter works, each conceived individually while also being one in a set of four similar pieces, and by one larger creation, in the most important form created in Western music, i.e. that of the Sonata.