Chopin: 傅聪 Fou Ts'ong

This CD has been released in memory of Tatiana Shebanova, who died not long after these recordings were made. It shows the exceptional relationship which she had with the historic Erard piano heard here. She fell in love with the instrument the very first time she played it.

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.

This CD has been released in memory of Tatiana Shebanova, who died not long after these recordings were made. It shows the exceptional relationship which she had with the historic Erard piano heard here. She fell in love with the instrument the very first time she played it.

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.

This set offers Chopin's most famous and best loved piano expertly played by Tamas Vasary.
Tamás Vásáry (born August 11, 1933, Debrecen, Hungary) is a Hungarian pianist. Vásáry gave his first public performances at the age of 8. He studied with Ernő Dohnányi and Józef Gát at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, and was later assistant there to Zoltán Kodály, who made him a gift of a Steinway piano.

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.

Nikita Magaloff is known, among other things, for his complete Chopin recordings. This programme, recorded some eighteen months before his death, shows his very mature pianism.

Combining clarity with a dazzling technique, investing the music "with a symphonic gravitas, elemental power and electrifying modernity" (International Record Review), over three-and-a-half decades Maurizio Pollini has traversed the major works of Chopin as no other pianist of his time. Here is the legacy of this unique achievement, in a single box set for the first time. The complete Chopin recordings from 1972 to 2008 Comprising the Études, Preludes, Polonaises, Sonatas, Scherzi, Ballades, Nocturnes Also includes the 2008 recital.

As one of the foremost interpreters of the piano music of Frédéric Chopin, Nelson Freire has a rather small number of all-digital recordings of this oeuvre on CD, most of them recorded for Decca since 2005. This double-disc package of the nocturnes is an excellent example of Freire's artistry, and the expressive lyricism and refined execution that are hallmarks of his playing are fully evident. The 20 nocturnes are among Chopin's most personal and intimate pieces, and Freire treats them all with tender feeling and a melodic sensibility that emphasize the vocal quality of the ornate melodies.

Domenico Scarlatti is a great composer disguised as a mediocre one. Part of the disguise is that he’s a formulaic miniaturist. It’s easy to dismiss his sonatas with the airy notion that if you’ve heard a few of them, you’ve heard them all. So pianists usually dispatch them as twee appetizers, played with a wink and a smirk, setting the table for meatier fare. But such dismissal dissolves under the sheer inventiveness of the sonatas. Like the protagonist in Ilse Aichinger’s “The Bound Man,” Scarlatti finds endless possibilities within his self-imposed confines.