Chopin Impromptu

Almost four hours of music constitutes exceptional value especially when, tucked away among a selection of Mazurkas, is Chopin's early "Variations on a German National Air". Vásáry charms you into wondering why it is so rarely heard.

For while it would be idle to pretend that this 70-year-old virtuoso, struck down at the height of his career with psoriatic arthritis, still commands the velocity and reflex of his earlier years, his later Chopin and Liszt are a tribute to a devotion and commitment gloriously enriched by experience. The First Impromptu is piquantly voiced and phrased while the C sharp minor Etude, Op. 25 No. 7, could hardly be more hauntingly confided, more ‘blue’ or inturned. How you miss the repeat in the C sharp minor Mazurka, Op. 50 No. 3 (not Op. 15, as the jewel-case claims), given such cloudy introspection and if there are moments when you recall how Rubinstein – forever Chopin’s most aristocratic spokesman – can convey a world of feeling in a scarcely perceptible gesture, Janis’s brooding intensity represents a wholly personal, only occasionally overbearing, alternative; an entirely different point of view. Time and again he tells us that there are higher goods than surface polish or slickness and in the valedictory F minor Mazurka, Op. 68 No. 4 he conveys a dark night of the soul indeed, an emotion almost too desolating for public utterance… Janis is no less remarkable in Liszt, whether in the brief but intriguing Sans mesure (a first performance and recording), in a Sonetto 104 del Petrarca as tear-laden as any on record and in a final Liebestod of an exhausting ardour and focus.

If the name of György Cziffra remains unswervingly associated with Liszt, Frédéric Chopin’s music was the pianist’s true love from his very childhood. Cziffra’s mastery and sensitivity works wonders, either in the waltzes, the impromptus, the études or the first piano concerto conducted by his son, all gathered in this superb collection.

Des enregistrements historiques fabuleux qui auront marqué l'évolution du piano, de l'enregistrement et de la lecture de chopin. Des interprétations globalement bonnes en ce qui concerne l'intégrale et, surtout, une classification qui permet d'ordonner aisément le répertoire de Chopin. Alors, bien sûr, il existe des interprétationsplus brillantes, plus prestigieuses mais ne dit-on pas aussi qu'il y a une certaine forme de subjectivité qui détermine un jugement? Ce coffret est un bon reflet de l'oeuvre de Chopin, honnêtement interprétée.

Featuring the Great Chopin Pianists from the past and today, Deutsche Grammophon presents a 28 CD box edition highlighting the riches of its Chopin catalogue, including eight Chopin competition winners and many of the most legendary Chopin artists of all time.

The quartet of Chopin pupils presented on this disc may or may not be known to you. Certainly Mikuli should be, as he’s the best known, but Tellefsen may also have crossed your musical horizons at some point; the short-lived Filtsch probably only via a semi-celebrated comment from Liszt and Gutmann, I suspect, not at all. Together we have twenty-two pieces of music, all brief, in dance or salon form, all predominantly light; a profusion, in other words, of Polonaises, Barcarolles, Impromptus, Waltzes, Mazurkas and the odd Nocturne and Bolero: a very Chopinesque kind of selection, albeit without sonatas.