Chopin: Scherzo No. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 31

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.

Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer: Ward Marston

Elisabeth Leonskja is considered to be one of the great artists of our time and regularly appears in all the musical centres of the world.

The making of this CD was part of the prize awarded to the winner of the 2007 Manchester International Piano Competition.

The First Manchester International Concerto Competition for Young Pianists was held in August 2007 in Manchester Cathedral, offering young pianists the rare and exciting opportunity to perform a concerto with an outstanding professional orchestra. Each applicant had to prepare and submit on DVD a complete performance of one of the standard romantic or classical piano concertos. From an initial number of pianists who entered from twenty countries, twenty-four young semifinalists were invited to come to Manchester to perform (twelve pianists in the 16 and under section and twelve in the 22 and under). After performing their concertos with piano accompaniment at Chetham’s School of Music, four finalists were chosen to perform their concertos with Manchester Camerata under Stephen Threlfall.

The competition was an unusual event in that every member of the jury was a well established concert pianist. In this respect it looked back to an earlier era of musical history, when the majority of jurors in piano competitions were players rather than teachers or critics. But the emphasis of the competition, which will be held again in August 2009 and which received a tremendous amount of encouragement and positive feedback from audiences, professional musicians, the media, teachers and participants themselves, is forward looking. It emphasises the positive for every young pianist who chooses to enter.