Frédéric François Chopin

“What is most impressive about this performance is the exquisite pianissimo both achieve, while maintaining a perfect tonal balance. The old complaint that the dense piano part dominates simply does not apply here: Stott's touch is so gossamer-light, the engineers had no need to throw the cello forward unnaturally.” BBC Music Magazine, December 2007 ****

“It would be hard to imagine a more powerful account of the Sonata than this one” Penguin Guide, 2011 edition

“Ashkenazy plays it marvellously well, and seems oblivious of the difficulties [Gaspard]. His soft playing is really soft, and yet always full of atmosphere and tension. He is lazily relaxed in “Ondine”, hushed and mesmeric in “Le Gibet”, and what one might call calmly brilliant in “Scarbo”. It is this combination of brilliance and poetry that is so individual about his playing, and the combination is especially striking in the Chopin Scherzo in E major. This is an extremely difficult piece to bring off, because it is not enough for the pianist to be merely brilliant. Indeed it is all too easy to make it sound a rather feeble work. Ashkenazy makes it sound tremendously good. He takes it at a great speed, but his approach is fundamentally tender and lyrical. I have never enjoyed it so much …Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse is much more than that. For once it really does sound “joyeuse”, and the exhilaration of it is irresistible. In short, this is a splendid record, and the sound … is all you could wish.”Gramophone January 1966

“On this disc we hear Ashkenazy at his best, idiomatic, warm and flexible in the two Chopin pieces, displaying a dazzling technique, and much more, in the Debussy, and investigating with fascinating results all the weirdness of Ravel.” BBC Music Magazine, September 2007 *****

“Arrau's technique is dazzling, especially for clarity - he uses little pedal - but here it’s difficult to forget that the etudes are etudes. Equally dry, ageing sound quality doesn't help.” BBC Music Magazine, Proms 2007 ***

“Arrau makes each piece wholly and uniquely his own.” Gramophone Magazine

“The Liszt especially is scintillating. From the opening octaves Li seems to throw caution to the wind, which is really the only way to play this concerto, fusing electrifying spontaneity with meticulous control.” BBC Music Magazine, April 2007 ****

“Mr. Li is a poetic player with a sensitive touch (but also ample power when he needs it), as well as an ear for textural clarity and an impeccable sense of line. Those qualities, notable on his handful of recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, served the Chopin perfectly.” New York Times

“There's a grand romanticism about Trpceski's interpretations… The hectic sweep in the Sonata's first subject drives ahead with a feverishness against which the second subject is allowed to relax, glowing deep and tender; and Trpceski's phrasing of the songful trio embedded in the manic second movement is simply magical.” BBC Music Magazine, March 2007 *****

“He quickly displayed the compelling hallmarks of his style: light but devastatingly punchy octaves; well delineated rhythms (he can pounce on chords with a drum-like vigour when he chooses); a gossamer touch in lyrical episodes; and an impeccable ear for internal balance.” The Times

“From Simon Trpceski, a relatively new star in EMI's firmament, Chopin's music boils with a Heathcliff-like defiance. Here is no drawingroom dandy but a composer who truly rages against the dying of the light. Yet just as awe replaces critical scrutiny when faced with Trpceski's formidable mastery, you remember how such towering virtuosity is complemented by an equally remarkable refinement. If few pianists have stormed the Second Sonata's first movement more heroically, even fewer have played the Funeral March's central Elysian Trio with such poise and concentration.
The four Scherzi, too, offer a similar combination of superlatives, one where a thrusting youthful impetuosity is balanced by lyrical introspection (try Chopin's central molto piùlento reworking of the Polish carol 'Sleep little Jesus'). Such unfaltering style and assurance are enough to make lesser pianists weep with envy and, more generally, there is an almost palpable sense of Chopin's irony, when he called three of his most savage utterances 'scherzo' (literally meaning a joke). Trpceski's dizzying voltage and aplomb, superbly recorded, represent the finest modern alternative.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“there’s a genuine feeling of spontaneity about these performances, yet he’s still able to bring out little details and emphasise lines you might not have noticed before...Personality in spades, yes, but there’s also integrity, and that really matters. You get the feeling that Trpceski really identifies with this composer-pianist...Sheer delight from end to end.” Andrew McGregor, bbc.co.uk, 2nd April 2007

“In glorious tone quality, drama, visionary intensity and sheer poetry, few pianists have ever surpassed Cortot. This CD is a treat, if you don't mind wrong notes, and includes two totally different interpretations of the Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2.” BBC Music Magazine, Proms 2007 *****

“This fifth and final release of Cortot's 78rpm Chopin recordings is surely the jewel in the crown. Here, the 1929 rather than the more familiar 1933 set of the Ballades blazes with a passion, brilliance and poetic audacity that set the pulses racing and the mind reeling. Here is a great artist who seized the opportunity to achieve ever greater heights of eloquence and rhetorical verve. Superbly restored by Mark Obert-Thorn, every performance is charged with a heady and consuming poetry that confirms Daniel Barenboim's claim that 'Cortot discovered the opium in Chopin'. Take the First Ballade's opening, where Cortot is every inch the bardic poet, free, rhapsodic and inimitable; or hear him in the Presto con fuoco storms of the Second Ballade, where he plays as if pursued by the furies of hell.
Again, even when inaccuracies fly in all directions in the heat of the chase, no other pianist has approached the Third Ballade's central C sharp minor turbulence with such daring or recreative force. Cortot was never one to hold back in the interests of decorum and in the Fourth Ballade he stretches the parameters of Chopin's poetry to the very edge, his playing close to being consumed in its own ecstasy.
His selection of Nocturnes (sadly his projected Chopin survey was never completed) pulse with the same alluring quality, suggesting the reverse of Rubinstein's more patrician elegance. True, for today's more antiseptic and 'tasteful' practitioners such artistic conviction and originality will seem extravagant or even camp. Yet there is surely no living pianist who could or would attempt to emulate such heart-stopping poetry.
Maria Callas herself would have been among the first to pay tribute to Cortot's cantabile, an unequalled 'singing' at the piano.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“The great French pianist famous for…. His magical touch and lovely singing tone and a flexibility of phrasing and movement as natural as breathing.” Sunday Times

“Chopin's songs might struggle to secure a regular place in the repertoire but at budget price there's no excuse not to encounter a master miniaturist painting on less familiar canvasses.” BBC Music Magazine, November 2006 ***

“A rare opportunity to sample Chopin the song composer, here performed with real feeling by Polish mezzo Urszula Kryger. The dark core of melancholy in Kryger’s voice is fine-tuned to the Slavic melodic contours of a song like The Sad Stream. And her instinctive grasp of both musical and verbal inflection makes for a beautifully understated performance of Melodya, Chopin’s last, heartfelt song of exile” Gramophone Magazine