Chopin / Maria Gabrys - Pno Works - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Chopin's Ballades are not a closed cycle; they were created in different times and circumstances. Moreover, no recommendations of the composer indicating their joint performance have been found. However, listening to them one after another is an extraordinary experience - the history of the artist's life, told with his most intimate musical language, reflecting the entire wealth and experience of his short, yet uncommonly fruitful life. None of Chopin's compositions exceed his ballads, neither in the mastery of the form nor in the beauty of the poetry. Karol Szymanowski, considered as the most outstanding Polish composer after Chopin, opened a new period of his works with Metopes and slightly later Masques, irrevocably departing from the neo-romantic stylistics to his own unique musical language, immersed both in universal European cultural roots and in Polish musical idioms. This by Justyna Gabzdyl, a Polish pianist living in Canada, consists of a very subjective, yet remarkably accurate, synthetic selection of what is most interesting in Polish piano music, and perhaps the most characteristic.

In Chopin Late piano works, Edoardo Torbianelli matches once again the poetry of his pianism with the rigor of his scholarly investigations into the music he plays. Together with the booklet essay-writer, Jeanne Roudet, Torbianelli has considered afresh the music written by Frédéric Chopin in the last fifteen years of the Polish composer's life. To follow on from his collection, Torbianelli has recorded at Fondation Royaumont in France - playing on an 1842 Ignace Pleyel grand piano - Chopin's A flat Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op 61, the B minor Sonata Op. 58 and a selection of Mazurkas and Nocturnes for this new Schola Cantorum Basiliensis presented by Glossa. With this programme Edoardo Torbianelli is situating the compositional approach more directly within Chopin's Polish heritage; though he later went into exile the composer was present in Warsaw until just before the November Uprising in 1830. Unlike Berlioz and Liszt, it is argued, Chopin eschewed literature as direct inspiration and - again unlike Liszt - the Polish composer's piano music shares similarities in technique and performative style with the bel canto school of singing, the descendant of the art of eighteenth-century castrati and perpetuated in the 1800s by Italian singers as heard by Chopin himself in Paris. The resulting InchvocalityInch of Chopin's piano music finds echo in Edoardo Torbianelli's interpretations for a recording which can be considered both for it's fresh approach but also as a masterly reflection of the composer's genius.

This debut album from the outstanding pianist Rafal Mokrzycki, devoted entirely to Fryderyk Chopin's music, is an ingenious compilation of musical genres, ranging from narrative forms (Ballade in G minor, Op. 23), ending with dance miniatures (Mazurkas, Op. 50 and waltzes). Rafal Mokrzycki is a Polish pianist. He is a winner of the Valletta International Piano Competition in Valletta, Malta, 2017, where he received also a special prize a possibility to play with the National Radio and Television Orchestra in Tirana, Albania. He has been awarded in many other national and international competitions and was supported by the Karol Szymanowski Foundation and the National Fund for Children. He is now a member of Music Societies in Torun and Poznan, Poland.