Chopin: Mazurka No. 25 in B minor, Op. 33 No. 4

Andras Schiff said of Horszowski’s Chopin: ‘It’s as though he had written the music himself. It’s unbelievably unpredictable, and yet it’s completely natural, and comes from within the composition. I learned a great deal about rubato from Horszowski, because he uses it in a way that’s like Chopin must have done: he never loses the pulse, and yet it’s played with great freedom.’

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

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'.

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.

Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer: Ward Marston

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.

On 21 June 1987, before an ecstatic audience in Hamburg’s Musikhalle, 83-year-old Vladimir Horowitz gave the last concert of a career that stretched over nearly seven decades. The recital, taped by North German Radio (NDR), lay in their archives virtually untouched for more than 20 years (one encore was included in Deutsche Grammophon’s anthology The Magic of Horowitz in 2003). It is now being released in its entirety for the first time in any format. The repertoire is familiar, with Mozart and Schumann (Kinderszenen op. 15) to the fore. There is a last heroic assault on Chopin’s Polonaise in A flat op. 53 and the final scintillating encore is Moszkowski’s Etincelles, a Horowitz evergreen. The recording provides a unique souvenir of Horowitz’s final public appearance, where the sense of occasion and immediacy is palpable.