Chopin Chaplin

Very popular during Chopin’s lifetime, the waltzes have long been a favourite with professionals and amateurs alike. Highly virtuosic - most of them were clearly not intended to be danced - and sometimes melancholy, they nevertheless retain the distinctive lightness and grace that we associate with the genre. These pieces have accompanied François Chaplin since his early days as a pianist. After so many years spent playing them, looking beyond their apparent simplicity and fathoming the depths of their poetry, this lifelong admirer of Chopin brings together here, on this magnificent recording - ten years after his complete Nocturnes - the composer’s 19 Waltzes. This complete and continuous reading enables us to perceive them as a whole, stunningly beautiful and full of verve.

Very popular during Chopin’s lifetime, the Waltzes have long been a favourite with professionals and amateurs alike. Highly virtuosic – most of them were clearly not intended to be danced – and sometimes melancholy, they nevertheless retain the distinctive lightness and grace that we associate with the genre. These pieces have accompanied François Chaplin since his early days as a pianist. After so many years spent playing them, looking beyond their apparent simplicity and fathoming the depths of their poetry, this lifelong admirer of Chopin brings together here, on this magnificent recording – ten years after his complete Nocturnes – the composer’s 19 Waltzes. This complete and continuous reading enables us to perceive them as a whole, stunningly beautiful and full of verve.

This album of popular short pieces provides a memento of the first French lockdown in 2020: Renaud Capuçon and pianist Guillaume Bellom performed on social media each day, raising the spirits of their fans. Ideal for streaming, the collection includes music by Enrico Morricone, Charlie Chaplin, Carlos Gardel, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Schumann.

Dimensions in Sound is one of Stanley Black's weirdest albums. A product of the mid- to late '60s, it taps into contemporary pop culture with "These Boots Are Made for Walking," "A Taste of Honey," "Michelle" (grossly intoned by the London Festival Chorus) and "Alfie" (played on acoustic guitar with sugary strings and oddly detached voices). Black shows off his keyboard chops with a reasonably dignified rendering of Chopin's "Fantasy Impromptu" and a suitably epic take on the music from Exodus; he also demonstrates a marvelously eccentric and creative sense of humor by basing what amounts to an eight-and-a-half-minute piano concerto on the ancient folk ditty "Three Blind Mice." Black's big-band treatment of Billy Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train" begins and ends with the sound of a passing subway…

Piano music forms a large part of the output of the Romanian composer Livia Teodorescu-Ciocănea (b. 1959), as you would expect of someone who has been playing the instrument since she was four. This first album of her music reveals a latter-day Impressionist, sensitive to half-light and petal-delicate tonal colour – but she can also generate powerful surges of energy, and her musical portrait of Charlie Chaplin testifies to an impish sense of humour.