Louis Lortie Plays Chopin, Vol. 5

Louis Lorties Chopin series is achieving landmark status, as confirmed by the increasingly enthusiastic reviews of progressive volumes. This fifth one sumptuously highlights the Polish influences in Chopins music, offering gems from among the mazurkas and polonaises. Relatively brief in duration and simple in structure, the mazurkas reveal other aspect of Chopins music: quirky melodies, strangely chromatic harmonies, oddly accented rhythms, irregular phrase lengths, and wildly contrasting keyboard textures.

For the seventh volume of his Chopin project, the Canadian pianist and exclusive Chandos Artist Louis Lortie has built a programme that includes works from the earliest to the latest period in the composer’s life, all of which are linked by their evocation of ‘nationality’ – Italy, Spain, and of course Chopin’s beloved Poland.

This is the fourth volume of Louis Lortie's highly-successful series devoted to Chopin. The recording perfectly illustrates how Chopin elevated the waltz to a genre of musical art, from danses de salon evocative of a genial milieu to 'works' with proper opus numbers. Growing up in the 1820s, the composer at first viewed the waltz purely pragmatically, as a means to a social end in the dance salon. But after spending time in Vienna and Paris in the 1830s he decided that a waltz might be worthy of the deeper appreciation accorded a 'work'.

Louis Lortie here gives us the third volume in his ongoing Chopin project. Throughout the series his guiding principle has been to emulate the recital practice of the great romantic pianists, who might play a short improvisation before a major work in order to set the audience in the right frame of mind. On this disc Lortie plays the four Impromptus and the Piano Sonata in B minor, introducing each with a Chopin Nocturne (typically of an improvisatory character) in the same or a related key.

Recording exclusively for Chandos, Lortie is recognised as one of the finest interpreters of Chopin today. He first recorded Chopin's Etudes for Chandos more than twenty years ago; the disc was named as one of the '50 great performances by superlative pianists' by BBC Music. Volume 1 of his current Chopin series also has received excellent reviews: the magazine Pianist wrote: 'He is a pianist of our time when it comes to speed, energy and an unfussy approach to Chopin. His way of playing is like a sharply cut steel sculpture, super elegant and with not one single smudge.' And in the words of International Piano: 'These are full-blooded and eloquent performances, an auspicious start to what looks likely to become one of the finest of Chopin surveys.'

In the era of the great romantic pianists, it used to be the fashion at piano recitals to offer an improvisation in the same key as that of the piece that was scheduled to follow, in order to get the audience ‘in the mood’. To compensate for this lost art, I have thought of always playing one of the nocturnes before a major piano composition by Chopin. It makes these nocturnes appear more like an improvisation, to serve as counterweight to the very dense content of the Ballades, Scherzos, and Sonatas. This practice transfers smoothly the logic of a piano recital to a CD and makes more sense by allowing the listener to enjoy the contents in one stretch’ writes Louis Lortie on his concept for the album.