Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21

The popular coupling of Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor and Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21, featuring Louis Lortie as the soloist, is here re-issued on Chandos Classics.

On the original release, CD Review wrote of the performance of Schumann’s Concerto: ‘…his playing is thrillingly imaginative and I cannot recall ever having heard the Finale sound so physically exciting as it does here.’ About the performance of Chopin’s F minor Concerto, the reviewer noted: ‘Lortie produces a scintillating reading which resounds in the mind long after the music has ceased.’

The Philharmonia Orchestra is conducted by Neeme Järvi.

The Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki is only fourteen years old, yet critics call him an ‘aristocrat of the piano’, ‘an extraordinary talent ‘and praise him for his mature and ‘remarkably poetic and imaginatively executed’ performances. He is already making a name for himself on the Canadian and international stage. The conductor Howard Shelley is himself an eminent pianist.

The disc features new recordings of the Chopin concertos performed on period instruments, documenting two outstanding artistic moments in the festival Chopin and his Europe. Dang Thai Son, winner of the Tenth Fryderyk Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw, is accompanied by Frans Brüggen’s Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century—a legendary ensemble restoring to music its authentic sound.