Chopin His Greatest

This 6CD set charts not only the development of the Nocturne as a musical form, but also the development of the piano from the closing years of the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. Two great ‘piano schools’ had emerged, each having some of the greatest performers and composers of the day associated with them. Some of these composers were highly successful businessmen as well – Clementi and Pleyel in particular established highly successful piano manufacturing and music publishing firms. The English school, with its powerful instruments (of which the pianos of John Broadwood and Co are the best examples) enabled London based composers such as Cramer, Clementi and Dussek to write music with a singing almost bel canto quality.

With ‘La Ronde’, Nicholas Angelich pays tribute to the relationships between three of Romanticism’s greatest composers for the piano. Schumann, Chopin and Liszt were born within 18 months of each other and knew each other personally. Schumann dedicated Kreisleriana to Chopin, who dedicated two of his Op.10 Etudes to Liszt, who, closing the circle, dedicated his B minor Piano Sonata to Schumann.

Pollini's traversal of Chopin's 19 Nocturnes (he leaves out the pair of posthumous ones) is one of his finest recordings in years. His long-lined yet detailed performances are comparable to the very different ones that have long stood at the pinnacle of recorded sets. Not as serene as Artur Rubinstein's, not as philosophical as Claudio Arrau's, nor as warm as Ivan Moravec's, Pollini's interpretations have their own allure. One is the way he shapes the melodies with a natural flow enhanced by his tonal beauty, less lean and streamlined than his usual way with Romantic music.

Chopin is touted to be the ‘poet’ of the piano. One must wonder what that means. A poem is an art form of taking written words and arranging them so that language is elevated up to an artistic realm. I feel Chopin, then, was indeed a poet of the piano. He took the extant musical language of his time, expanded the musical vocabulary, and arranged them to make the expanded scope of expression possible. Chopin’s music requires a specialised kind of pianism: supple yet strong fingers, an almost infinite range of tone colours, a sense of timing that is well-proportioned but not exaggerated, etc. Nina Svetlanova was my teacher during my doctoral studies at the Manhattan School of Music. She entered Heinrich Neuhaus’s studio in Moscow when she was sixteen. In that studio, she learned of secret know-hows of piano playing. Playing legato (or mimicking as best as you could) was part of countless brilliant ways of playing the piano.

Born Paul Mazzolini on February 18, 1960 in Beirut, Lebanon, to a family of an Italian diplomat and an American singer, Gazebo spent his early years globetrotting around the world with his parents. Upon his return to Italy in the early '80s, he recorded his first song, "Masterpiece", co-written with his friend Pier Luigi Giombini. Issued as a single, it became a big success in Italy in 1982 and only missed the number one spot in the charts by a whisker. A year later, Gazebo released his self-titled debut album, containing the hit song "I Like Chopin": a number one in Italy and 15 other countries that sold eight million copies around the world and contributed to the popularity of the nascent Italo-dance style. Later reissues of this album (from 1984 on) state "I Like Chopin" as album title.

This Chopin recital represents Murray Perahia's return to the Sony studios after a two-year absence due to serious injury. So may I start by saying that this is surely the greatest, certainly the richest, of all his many and exemplary recordings. Once again his performances are graced with rare and classic attributes and now, to supreme clarity, tonal elegance and musical perspective, he adds an even stronger poetic profile, a surer sense of the inflammatory rhetoric underpinning Chopin's surface equilibrium. In other words the vividness and immediacy are as remarkable as the finesse. And here, arguably, is the oblique but telling influence of Horowitz who Perahia befriended during the last months of the old wizard's life.

Back in the fifties my music master took me to the Royal Festival Hall to hear Georges Cziffra. This momentous occasion was as much a political event as a musical one. Having recently breached the 'iron curtain' in a dramatic escape to the West from his native Hungary (where he had recently been imprisoned) in the aftermath of the 1956 revolution, the press had hyped him up into a newly discovered world class virtuoso cum freedom fighter. He fell into the role with much aplomb.