Claudio Arrau Chopin: Piano Works

Claudio Arrau is widely considered by many to be one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. This collection contains many of Chopin works including the rarely performed pieces for Piano and Orchestra such as Rondo a la krakowiak, Fantasy on Polish Airs and Variations on Mozart's La ci darem la mano. Like most of Arrau's works, the Chopin is played very seriously, at slower tempo, but nevertheless is superb. The Preludes, Nocturnes are recommended the most, but this collection is a must have for any Arrau fan.

Although Claudio Arrau had impressive credentials as a Liszt player - his only teacher was Martin Krause, who was a student of Liszt - and he performed many of the composer's works early in his career, he neither exploited this association, nor became known as a Liszt specialist. Perhaps this was because Krause warned him not to become a specialist in the music of any one composer, urging him instead to embrace all music. Consequently, the younger Arrau's repertoire was very large; however, as he grew older he concentrated on fewer composers, moving as it were from the universal to the particular applying almost prophetic insight into certain scores, especially those of Beethoven and Liszt.

In celebration of Chopin’s 200th anniversary in 2010, here is the ultimate, complete, in particular priced 17-CD edition of the composer’s works, combining the very best recordings from the Deutsche Grammophon and Decca catalogs. Featured are some of the great Chopin interpreters of our time–Argerich, Pires, Pollini, Zimerman–with substantial contributions from particular pianists of the younger generation such as Rafał Blechacz and Yundi Li.

Claudio Arrau is widely considered by many to be one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. This collection contains many of Chopin works including the rarely performed pieces for Piano and Orchestra such as Rondo a la krakowiak, Fantasy on Polish Airs and Variations on Mozart's La ci darem la mano. Like most of Arrau's works, the Chopin is played very seriously, at slower tempo, but nevertheless is superb. The Preludes, Nocturnes are recommended the most, but this collection is a must have for any Arrau fan.

Claudio Arrau - Chopin (1991) {6CD Box Set Philips Classics 432 303-2}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 1.32 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 884 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 494 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1991 Philips Classics | 432 303-2
Classical / Romantic / Piano

"Arrau's Chopin – now available in a six-CD box (Philips 432 303-2) as part of Philips's Arrau Edition – is as far from moonstruck "sentimentality" as any Chopin ever was. But no performance of the Preludes is more sentimental, in Schiller's sense, than the version Arrau recorded for Philips in 1973. Its premise – that the cycle is a grand tragedy, the darkest thing Chopin wrote – is unmistakable. Even the prefatory C-major Prelude heaves with orgasmic rubatos – more weight, it seems, than the music can possibly bear. And yet, as Arrau packs each small berth with a world of feeling, the weight grips and holds. At times, the sheer density of emotion can seem suffocatingly intense. The Prelude No. 22, a Stygian descent, is surely Hades; the plunging scales of No. 24 rip the thread of life."

If you're already a fan of Russian music of the Imperial Age, you already know at least the name Mily Balakirev, the living link between Glinka, the father of Russian music, and Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov, the composer who sacrificed much of his composing time to his pupils and part of his life to his insanity, but who nevertheless turned out indubitable masterpieces in several genres. The First Symphony and the symphonic poem Tamara are probably his best-known orchestral works, but his best-known single work in any genre is certainly his Islamy, the piece of pseudo-ethnic, super-virtuoso sex-dance music that Russian pianists still occasionally trot out as an encore.