Chopin Polish Songs

All is emotion and refinement in the interpretations of the soprano Raquel Camarinha and the pianist Yoan Héreau.

All is emotion and refinement in the interpretations of the soprano Raquel Camarinha and the pianist Yoan Héreau.On this disc, they introduce us to an atypical and little-known sector of Chopin’s output, revealing the beauty of his Polish songs, haunted by the torments of exile and love.By placing them alongside the Lieder der Mignon, which include some of Schubert’s finest settings of Goethe, the duo achieves an extremely rare symbiosis between poetry and music.

“One should sing with the fingers,” or “If you want to play piano, you need to learn to sing” - uch statements and similar quotes by Frederic Chopin have been passed down by many of his students from their piano lessons with him. With a nearly Baroque-Classical aesthetic, he preached the idea of an analogy between music and language, and from this he paid meticulous attention to phrasing and articulation. It thus comes as no surprise that contemporaries and epigonic composers happily used the vocal habitus of many of his piano works to arrange them as actual art songs. Several particularly successful examples, written by Luigi Bordese, Pauline Viardot and anonymous composers were compiled for the present release by pianist Wolfgang Brunner, long-standing director of the Salzburg Hofmusik, with singers Lydia Teuscher, Olivia Vermeulen, Karol Kozlowski und Andreas Schmidt.

Chopin did not compose very many songs, around thirty or so, and he did not write all of them down, and so no more than twenty have come down to us. Nevertheless, they are not an entirely marginal strand in the Chopin oeuvre, but rather a path running alongside the highway.

Claudio Arrau (1903-1991) is a pianist fully deserving of the epithet ‘legendary’. His rigorous intellect and sense of the sublime found expression in his transcendent technique and sumptuous, yet lucid sonorities.

Claudio Arrau (1903-1991) is a pianist fully deserving of the epithet ‘legendary’. His rigorous intellect and sense of the sublime found expression in his transcendent technique and sumptuous, yet lucid sonorities.

"The Chopin Project" is the most ambitious project of the Franco-Belgian cellist Camille Thomas to date, which includes a trio of albums paying tribute to Chopin's favorite instrument.

Following his widely admired Back to Bach and Ronald Stevenson recordings, Kenneth Hamilton gives us Preludes to Chopin, the latest release in Prima Facie's Heritage series.

The second year of the Année de pèlerinagededicated to Italy, is judged overall to be the most important of the three. The whole series of the second year was published in 1858 and was preceded by two compilations which date from 1837 and 1849 respectively. On this recording the three Petrarca Sonnets are presented. The appearance of these Sonnets in Liszt's works dated back to around 1838 as lieder for voice and piano, which were later excellently transcribed for piano solo.