Chopin: Mazurkas Op. 59 Nos. 1-3

“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.

The debut album from South Korean pianist Jingsang Lee features little heard music - the Piano Sonata No 1 and Three Caprices - by Ferdinand Hiller (1811- 1885) alongside popular repertoire by Mendelssohn and Chopin. What makes this double CD especially unusual and attractive is that it pairs a studio recording of the programme performed on a modern Steinway grand piano with a live recital recording of all the same pieces played on three period Steinway pianos dating broadly from the years when the composers were active.

Jinsang Lee first performed this recital under the title ‘Music Making Among Friends’, an imaginary soirée involving three Romantic composers who had become very good friends.

The recording makes no pretence at historical authenticity - there’s no record of what the three young men may have played at their meetings in Paris and in Germany, and Hiller’s First Sonata was published in 1852, after the deaths of both Chopin and Mendelssohn - but it ponders on each composer performing their own music for each other’s enjoyment.

Born in 1981 in Seoul, Jingsang Lee was the first prize winner of the Hong Kong International Piano Competition in 2008, a triennial event organized by the Chopin Society of Hong Kong. Lee found Hiller’s music in the library of the Hochschule für Musik Köln where he was studying - the composer founded that august institution in 1850. Hiller’s compositions may be rarely performed nowadays but they are robust, musical and a delight to listen to.

Evgeni Bozhanov is a distinguished Bulgarian pianist carried by the temperament of great virtuosity from the late 19th and the early 20th century. He is the winner of the 2nd Prize in the prestigious Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition of Belgium [Belgium, 2010] and has won awards in numerous piano competitions since 1996, including 4th prize in the 16th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw [2010].

This CD gives the listener the opportunity to savour the artistry of Bozhanov’s piano playing, as it illustrates well his interesting and individual approach to Frederic Chopin’s works.