About
Why does a pianist record Chopin?
Out of inevitability. One can hardly feel like a pianist without dealing with Chopin’s oeuvre. Why am I recording Chopin? For the same reason. To explore, experience, practice and record the very core of his work is for me an encounter with the extraordinary.
Still, one may not be able to resist questions like: What is the point of such a recording? How many perfect recordings might already exist? How many of them have attained fame, and how many have, for unknown reasons, fallen into oblivion?
Nowadays, a classical music performer gets rarely paid to make a recording, and it is downright impossible for one to make a living entirely in this way. The phenomenon of easily disseminated data formats has deprived musicians of a large proportion of their livelihood, but it has also, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, brought considerable freedom. Today, more or less the only reason for making a recording is simply the performer’s wish for it to be made. This is also my case. A thing for its own sake.
There is nothing more romantic in art than Chopin’s Ballades – stories of unbridled passion, tender desires, ecstatic joy, painful falls, tragic ends. Chopin taught music how to narrate. I can’t avoid the feeling that music outgrows itself here, breaks out of its notes and wordlessly speaks, provoking visual imagery, creating archetypal scenes full of suspense, and, from the beginning, leading to an inevitable end.
Chopin’s Scherzos are not jokes, as one could suppose from the word’s meaning in Italian. „What will gravity look like if a joke is coated with such darkness?“ This question was posed by Robert Schumann when reviewing Chopin’s Scherzo No. 1. Out of the four that Chopin composed, only the fourth one is true to its title, the others offer passionate drama with stormy movements which find refuge in the calm oases of the middle parts.