Chopin 2

If the name of György Cziffra remains unswervingly associated with Liszt, Frédéric Chopin’s music was the pianist’s true love from his very childhood. Cziffra’s mastery and sensitivity works wonders, either in the waltzes, the impromptus, the études or the first piano concerto conducted by his son, all gathered in this superb collection.

Maria João Pires, widely recognized as one of the most brilliant pianists of the last forty years, celebrates her 20th anniversary as a Deutsche Grammophon exclusive recording artist with this 2-CD release devoted entirely to the works of Chopin, the artist's first new recording in over four years. Pires's affinity for Chopin has always been well-known to both critics and audiences; in fact, her interpretations are so beloved that her 1996 recording of Chopin's Nocturnes remains the best-selling solo piano recording of the past 20 years by a living Deutsche Grammophon artist.

Leopold Godowsky's "transcriptions" of Chopin's etudes are notorious for being technically difficult beyond the originals and, therefore, are rarely played, much less recorded, unless the pianist is a super-virtuoso like Marc-André Hamelin. Boris Berezovsky is another who has proven himself up to the task of successfully performing the fiendish studies.

Angela Hewitt has applied the same intense study to Chopin's Nocturnes and Impromptus as she does to any composer's keyboard works. The result is a set of pieces lovingly played and appreciated, with personally felt emotion. The most outwardly emotional displays, as in the Nocturnes, Op. 15, are never wildly loud and always return to an introverted state afterward. In the Nocturnes she uses little touches of rubato so frequently as to almost stretch the melodies out of shape, as in Op. 9/1, but she plays many of the Nocturnes a tick faster than other pianists so that they stand up to that kind of manipulation better, and she never slows down to fit in ornaments. Her ornaments always fit right into the melody, both in her timing and her phrasing, and are feathery soft.

The quartet of Chopin pupils presented on this disc may or may not be known to you. Certainly Mikuli should be, as he’s the best known, but Tellefsen may also have crossed your musical horizons at some point; the short-lived Filtsch probably only via a semi-celebrated comment from Liszt and Gutmann, I suspect, not at all. Together we have twenty-two pieces of music, all brief, in dance or salon form, all predominantly light; a profusion, in other words, of Polonaises, Barcarolles, Impromptus, Waltzes, Mazurkas and the odd Nocturne and Bolero: a very Chopinesque kind of selection, albeit without sonatas.

Pianist Alexei Lubimov performs all the works on this new recording on the Pianino / Upright piano Pleyel, 1843, Chopin's Piano. "I wanted to imagine how Classical repertoire could have sounded when interpreted by Chopin and his pupils on a Pleyel pianino in the composer's study-salon in Parisat home, with no audience. The Pleyel pianino dictated the manner of performing works by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, using its magic to transform their works into musical images of Chopin's world. I wanted to imagine, to grasp that hypnotic 'Chopinisation' of the great pre-Chopin composers.

When Pogorelich did not make the finals of the 1980 Warsaw Competition (where they play exclusively Chopin), his response was to sign with Deutsche Grammophon for his first recording and he made it an all-Chopin affair. From his stunning opening take on Chopin's Sonata #2, to a Funeral March restored to its grandeur, to the breaktaking final moments of the Scherzo #3, Pogorelich announced to the music world that he'd arrived.

Other than Rubinstein, there is no greater Chopin interpreter than Horowitz, and in his single greatest work – the second sonata which is the highlight of this disc – I find Horowitz preferable because Rubinstein takes the great funeral march of the third movement too slowly, whereas Horowitz' direct approach conveys an even deeper sense of melancholy and tragedy. That said, this is a superb sampling of Horowitz' art, even better than the first volume of this series, with unworldly playing and fine sound quality for an analogue recording. The second sonata is second to none, and the shorter pieces are all very familiar and superbly played.