Chopin Piano Concertos

Pianist Yundi, formerly Yundi Li, might have several reasons for trying something new with Chopin. It was with Chopin that he became the youngest and the first Chinese winner of the International Frédéric Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, at age 18 in 2000, and he has played Chopin countless times since then. Cynics might recall that a Yundi Chopin concerto performance crashed and burned several years ago owing to miscommunications between pianist and conductor. Whatever the case, Yundi here conducts the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra from the keyboard.

Uzbek-born pianist Anna Malikova is best known for her interpretations of music by Chopin. She has performed and recorded both concertos, the complete etudes, preludes, and impromptus, and numerous individual solo works. But Malikova is hardly a specialist: she plays a wide range of compositions, taking in large segments of the outputs of J.S. Bach, Soler, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. She has toured extensively throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America, and has performed with many of the world's leading ensembles, including the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and the major orchestras of Warsaw, Moscow, Sydney, Oslo, Tashkent, and others.

The Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11, is a piano concerto written by Frédéric Chopin in 1830, when he was twenty years old. It was first performed on 12 October of that year, at the Teatr Narodowy (the National Theatre) in Warsaw, Poland, with the composer as soloist, during one of his "farewell" concerts before leaving Poland. It was the first of Chopin's two piano concertos to be published, and was therefore given the designation of Piano Concerto "No. 1" at the time of publication, even though it was actually written immediately after the premiere of what was later published as Piano Concerto No. 2.

Known for his dazzling performances of music by Franz Liszt and Sergey Rachmaninov, Russian virtuoso Nikolai Lugansky presents his first recording of the two piano concertos of Frédéric Chopin, which are much quieter than his usual fare. Indeed, the music seems quite intimate and almost chamber-like on this 2013 Naïve Ambroisie release, due to Lugansky's controlled and fairly introspective playing.

It was an eminently sensible decision to couple Zimerman's previously separate Chopin concertos on a single CD. The Ax/Ormandy/RCA disc is the only rival as a coupling, so let me say at once that in different moods I would be equally happy with either. The main difference, I think, is the actual sound. From DG we get a closer, riper sonority, with Zimerman's piano much more forwardly placed. Both orchestra and piano are more distanced on the RCA recording, especially Ax's piano. This, together with Ax's lighter, more translucent semiquaver figuration (and sometimes his greater willingness to stand back and merely accompany—as in certain episodes in the F minor Concerto's finale) often conjures up visions of Chopin himself at the keyboard, and we know he was often criticized for insufficiently strong projection. From an interpretative viewpoint, it's usually a matter of roundabouts and swings. In the E minor work, for instance, we get a slightly more flowing Romanze from Ax, and a slightly more propulsive finale from Zimerman. Orchestral honours are similarly divided, with Giulini extracting an exceptionally rich cantabile from his American orchestra.