Chopin: Mazurka No. 17 in B flat minor, Op. 24 No. 4

“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.

Cédric Tiberghien offers us a panorama of Chopin’s output, with three of the composer’s key works framed by a selection of mazurkas.

“I devised a recital programme for the 150th anniversary of Chopin’s death in 1999. The idea was to offer a panoramic survey of his output featuring several representative ‘large’ pieces, with the mazurkas providing a sort of chronological thread between them. So ten years later it was a natural process to narrow the focus down to three key pieces from different periods of Chopin’s life, surrounded by a generous selection of mazurkas… One of the very first Chopin pieces I discovered was on a record telling the story of the composer’s life: the Mazurka op.68 no.2, which illustrates the nostalgia for his homeland, the melancholy so often present in his music. I think the mazurkas show the most intimate side of Chopin’s personality, with their mixture of improvisation, evocation, and the ephemeral. These short pieces were a way for him to stay in touch with the roots of his country; he has nothing to prove, he submits to no rule except that of his inner music. I find it fascinating to see how varied Chopin’s inspiration is despite the common basis of all the mazurkas. As I explored the fifty-one pieces in the collection, I rediscovered masterpieces I thought I knew already, while others that were new to me have now become essential parts of my life. Chopin wrote mazurkas throughout his adult career, from 1830 to 1849. The first ones (opp.6 and 7) emphasise the popular element, while the later examples (op.59, op.68 no.4) show an unprecedented harmonic refinement that betrays his contact with French culture. The Scherzo has always struck me with its violence, which grips you right from the first chord and never lets up until the magnificent ‘Christmas carol’ which is transcendent in its simplicity. The Nocturne illustrates how important melody was for Chopin. He insisted that all his pupils should practise singing so that they would sense the phrasing, the direction of the lines, the moments of tension and relaxation. The Polonaise-Fantaisie is a very special work. It’s at the very opposite pole from the mazurkas, if only in its dimensions; and it achieves a mysterious balance between its improvisatory aspect and the strength of its architecture, between extreme complexity and a feeling of intimacy. The opening chords warn the listener: ‘Prepare for an extraordinary journey.’ If I were allowed to keep only one work by Chopin, it would be this Polonaise-Fantaisie in A flat – a key which was very dear to him, incidentally. For me it’s the perfect expression of his personality.” Cédric Tiberghien

“When Tiberghien next plays in London, be there.” Geoff Brown, The Times

Concert reviews: Chopin Mazurkas

“The case for the innovatory nature of Chopin's mazurkas, penetrating the deepest of emotions often with the sparsest of musical gestures, was formidably made.” Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 26 January 2010

“This is very close to what we know about Chopin's own playing...How well Tiberghien caught the gentle, musing melancholy of the opening, and how the silence before the ensuing storm seemed to press on our eardrums!” The Daily Telegraph

Chopin‘s oeuvre is extraordinarily manifold. It contains the whole spectrum of feelings that can stir the human soul: from the most subtle and profoundly personal emotions in the nocturnes and mazurkas to those grandiose feelings reflecting the epic of a whole nation in the polonaises and sonatas. Listening to his music is for us like experiencing a miracle. For a born Chopin interpreter is not someone who plays a lot of Chopin, but someone who finds that special “Chopin quality” in his own soul which enables him to discover in his interpretation of Chopin what no-one has discovered before him, but what is in harmony with Chopin’s world, Chopin’s poetry. Pianist Boris Bloch has a very familiar relationship to Chopin: “Today Chopin represents for me that ivory tower where I seek refuge in these troubled times in which we live.”

Critically acclaimed pianist Yevgeny Sudbin here presents a recital of music from Fryderyk Chopin.

Sudbin opens this disc with the expansive Fantaisie in F minor – sometimes described as the composer's 'grandest work' – continuing with a selection of pieces from three genres that are strongly associated with Chopin: Mazurkas, Nocturnes and the Ballades Nos 3 and 4.

Sudbin’s approach to Chopin’s music has been influenced by the composer’s own words regarding interpretation: 'Simplicity is the highest goal, achievable when you have overcome all difficulties.'

In his own paraphrase of the composer’s Minute Waltz, entitled À la minute, Sudbin displays all of his skills that led Piano Magazine to describe him as 'a fearless technician with an all-encompassing command of his instrument; a musical dramatist of exceptional acumen and sophistication; a poet who moves seamlessly between unbridled rhetoric and extreme intimacy; a stylist who catches the particular spirit of everything he plays'.

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.

This new recording of 21 of Chopin's Mazurkas sees the young Russian pianist Vassily Primakov commencing his exploration of Chopin's solo works for Bridge Records.