Chopin: Scherzo No. 3 in C sharp minor, Op. 39

Chopin spent the winter of 1838/39 with George Sand and her children in Majorca, where they stayed in an abandoned Carthusian monastery at Valldemosa. George Sand wrote a famous and popular story about the holiday. On this CD Sand's words, taken from her memoirs, are spoken by Hannelore Elsner.

The essential collection of favourite solo works for Chopin Year 2010!

Over 140 minutes of pure listening pleasure

2CDs for the price of 1

Featuring Argerich, Ashkenazy, Barenboim, Blechacz, Freire, Grimaud, Gulda, Horowitz, Lang Lang, Michelangeli, Ott, Pires, Pollini and many more

“Chopin was the greatest of us all, for he discovered everything through the piano alone”. So wrote Debussy about the Polish master, the 200th anniversary of whose birth is celebrated in 2010. This collection – featuring the world’s greatest pianists – bears out this remark, ranging from the dreamy to the heroic, from the passionate to the playful, with all Chopin’s favourite titles included.

1958 was a red-letter year not only in music competition history but in the entire history of performance. For it was then that 23-year-old Van Cliburn of Texas won the first Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, taking with him both the hearts of the Russian people and his jury (which included such luminaries as Shostakovich, Kabalevsky, Richter and Gilels). Thawing the political freeze between Russia and America, he went on to achieve a celebrity and charisma unknown since the days of Liszt and Paderewski. But Cliburn’s only London solo concert, given at the Royal Festival Hall one year later, was a no less remarkable event. There I joined a capacity audience (including a bevy of Hollywood stars) on a hot summer afternoon to witness playing of a wholly extraordinary communicative character and power. And, strolling down memory lane and listening once more to one of the most remarkable recitals ever given on the South Bank, one word comes to mind above all others and that is ‘eloquence’. It is surely a truism to say that today, as never before, the world is teeming with pianists whose mechanical skill is unmatched by a convincing musical voice or sound. Cliburn’s technique – something far transcending mere mechanics in its overwhelming range, colour and sonority – was immense and yet was always at the service of a generous spirit, anxious only to celebrate and share great music. Throughout this recital he ‘speaks’ with a voice and sonority uniquely his own. Expectation pulsed at fever pitch, yet Cliburn’s vast audience was taken by surprise when he launched into the National Anthem, milked and thundered for all its worth; a lavish and very Texan tribute to the British people (in today’s parlance, to ‘that special relationship’). But then came Mozart and the Sonata in C, K.330, gently and affectionately confided, alive with that unmistakable full and ‘golden’ Cliburn tone and a legato and cantabile ‘more Russian than the Russians’. Yet at the same time everything was delicately and imaginatively pointed with a special sense of Mozart’s poetic ambiguity, his subtle and melancholic undertow. From the booklet note by Bryce Morrison

With his exceptional gift for melody and his highly sophisticated and subtle sense of harmony, Frederic Chopin created some of the most Romantic piano music ever written. This collection offers a widely varied selection of these beautiful and much loved pieces, from the calm introspective mood of the Nocturnes, through the pure joy of the Waltzes to the grand passion of the “Revolutionary” Etude in C minor, the Fantaisie-impromptu and the “Heroic” Polonaise.

It is pianist’s first CD on a historic instrument (Pleyel, 1848). Kevin Kenner is the Laureate of the 2nd Price at the 12th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw (1990).

Recordings made on a Playel piano from 1848. Recorded in Witold Lutoslawski Polish Radio Concert Studio, Warsaw, 17-19 March 2008.