Chopin: Mazurka No. 14 in G minor, Op. 24 No. 1

“Min plays with the most ravishing piano tone I’ve heard in the last 50 discs I’ve listened to, at least! Her dynamic control is out of this world … anybody’s music would be served well by Min’s touch.”

Thus raved American Record Guide’s Stephen Estep in his review of a previous recording by distinguished Korean pianist Klara Min. With this release, Min brings her special touch to a seventeen-piece survey of her favorite Mazurkas – a unique “composer genre” from Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849): widely regarded as the most intimate, heartfelt, emotionally varied, and deeply personal music that this beloved “Poet of the piano” ever wrote. Loosely based on the traditional Polish mazurek dance-form, Chopin applied subtle classical sophistication and advanced (for his day) harmonic schemes to this mostly simple folk-form, elevating it into high musical art that is far better-suited to the concert stage (or classical recordings) than to dancing!

Klara Min – justly renowned for her championing of Korean composers as well as her overall versatility – applies her “ravishing piano tone” to these lovely and affecting works, as well as her rare interpretive acumen, technical wizardry, plus a deeply intuitive and soulful affinity for Chopin’s music.

Janusz Olejniczak is one of the leading Polish pianists and began learning the piano at the age of only six. He has performed in almost every country in Europe as well as Japan, America, Australia and Cuba and has made many recordings. Here he performs on an 1838 Erard fortepiano.

This is a very personal album from the pianist Vardo Rumessen.

It is dedicated to the memory of the Polish President Lech Kaczynski who, along with a number of colleagues and family members, lost his life in the air disaster in Smolensk on April 10th 2010

To celebrate the bicentennial of Fryderyk Chopin's birth, Naïve are proud to re-issue, ‘Impressions on Chopin’ - a fascinating, charming and refreshing album that sees the internationally acclaimed jazz pianist Leszek Mozdzer perform his own arrangements of well known works by Chopin.

An outstanding pianist, composer and producer, multi-award winning Leszek Mozdzer is one of Poland’s best-loved and most successful jazz pianists. In Mozdzer’s world of music without nationality, the Polish mazurka works alongside ragtime, flamenco and Cuban calypso and the typically Chopin rubato is occasionally replaced by a swing pulse. The original harmony too becomes a field for experimentation, and with the piano significantly ’prepared’ the sound of the music is entirely different, indeed at times, light years from the Chopin of tradition. All arrangements are by Leszek Mozdzer, except tracks 4 and 15 which were arranged by Leszek Mozdzer and Madjid Khaladj. Following its initial release, ‘Impressions on Chopin’ garnered Mozdzer international acclaim and resulted in him being ranked as among the most outstanding pianists and virtuosos of his generation.

Frédéric Chopin was a devoted champion of the Mazurka. Anna Gourari has selected a programme of works illustrating his life, as if in a musical diary. She lends these triple-time pieces an irresistibly attractive pulse, painting an exquisitely defined and colourful image. In short, Anna Gouari’s performance is stunning.

Koriolov was born in Moscow in 1949. As a student, he won numerous prizes at international competitions and after graduating was invited to teach at the Tchaikovsky Conservatoire. He later became a professor in Hamburg. His previous recordings on Tacet have all been very well received.

Fou Ts’ong is one of the greatest Chopin interpreters alive today, a prize-winner at the Fifth International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1955, at which he also received the Polish Radio Prize for the best performance of mazurkas, eighteen of which he interprets on an original ‘Chopinian’ instrument on this disc. They date from different periods in the composer’s oeuvre.

The CD contains the Sonata in B flat minor, Op. 35, Scherzo in B flat minor, Op. 31, Nocturne in C sharp minor, Mazurkas and Waltzes in a new recording on an Erard piano from 1849 made by the brilliant pianist and Chopin interpreter Janusz Olejniczak, winner of Sixth Prize in the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw (1970).

Recorded in Witold Lutoslawski Polish Radio Concert Studio, Warsaw, 10-11 September 2007.