Chopin: Mazurka No. 32 in C sharp minor, Op. 50 No. 3

Anne Queffélec is among the most popular pianists of her generation, appreciated for the diversity of her repertoire, as her impressive discography testifies. In addition to the French repertoire, she has became particularly known for her performance of works by Mozart and Scarlatti. Her recordings include works of J.S. Bach, Scarlatti, Liszt, Chopin, Schubert, Mozart, Fauré and Debussy.

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.

Over two evenings in 1983 (4 February and 7 November) in the concert hall of Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles, the world-famous pianist Ivan Moravec spellbound the audience with his majestic performance. This master of the piano’s precision marries cultivated tone and widely differentiated articulation, augmented by deep musical élan.

Each tone has absolute logic within the order of the composition he interprets, be it Beethoven’s expansive Sonata in D major, “Pastoral”, or the seemingly smaller pieces by Brahms and Chopin. And it is precisely in the latter that Ivan Moravec excels as a master of tiny area, which he wondrously chases in stylistic terms and renders ebulliently.

The live recording breathes in the airy atmosphere of the concert hall, one that can hardly be evoked in studio albums. The recording clearly shows that the world of Beethoven’s, Chopin’s and Brahms’s piano works is close to the essence of Moravec’s being.

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.