Orga

Born in 1941, and currently chief conductor of the Orchestre de Paris, Christoph Eschenbach is one of today’s foremost conductor-pianists. This fascinating retrospective focuses on his brilliant early career as a pianist, when his searching musical intelligence, formidable technique and enthusiastic engagement with the music of his, and our, time produced many recordings that have stood the test of time.

This Naxos CD was recorded in March 1995 in the Concert Hall in Katowice and contains a very good performance of that old warhorse, Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No.1 in B flat minor, Op.23. The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra sound just great thanks to the producer Günter Appenheimer and, particularly, conductor Antoni Wit. Pianist Bernd Glemser has plenty of fire when needed coupled with delicacy as appropriate. It's a really good performance.

’Heroic hymns of battle’ was how the American critic James Huneker visualized Chopin’s polonaises. ‘In them’, Liszt wrote evocatively in his Life of Chopin, ‘are to be found embodied the noblest traditional feelings of the Poland of a bygone age; through them breathe the stern resolve and the reflective gravity of the Poles of other days. Usually of a warlike character, bravery and valour are in these polonaises rendered with a simplicity of expression which was a distinctive characteristic of this warlike people. They bring before the imagination with vivid intensity the ancient Poles as they are described in their chronicles.’