Having garnered the ultimate accolades from a host of arts review pages for her premiere recording on the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie’s organ and on the double organ of the Taiwanese Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, concert organist Iveta Apkalna now presents her third release on the Berlin Classics label as a triple album. "Triptychon" spans three centuries and three religious confessions on one single organ: Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Liszt and Pēteris Vasks can be heard on this, the first release of a recording played in Neubrandenburg’s Concert Church on the organ which she helped to develop and inaugurated.Apkalna opens the first altar panel with three works by her compatriot and personal friend: alongside Arvo Pärt, Pēteris Vasks is the best known and most often played Baltic composer. “Latvia is Pēteris Vasks and Pēteris Vasks is Latvia”, explains the organist. “I hear the landscape of Latvia in his music, the far horizons of our flat country, the meadows and forests, birdsong and the sea. Pēteris Vasks is undoubtedly a truly Latvian character, though he also breathes the "global air". Otherwise people all around the world would not love his music”.

“Chopin is a composer who has been with me since I started playing the piano as a child. In Japan, where I grew up, it is impossible to avoid Chopin’s music! He is one of the most popular composers for everybody, and all pianists start playing and getting to know his music from a very young age. Therefore, he becomes an essential part of your life very naturally. I have wanted to record the complete Preludes for a long time. It is always very interesting to approach works like this that are conceived as a whole – like the 24 Bach Preludes and Fugues or the Debussy Preludes. Each prelude is individual, and each is in a different tonality so the colour and characters are completely different, and as the structure of each individual prelude is relatively open there is a lot of freedom for interpretation.” – Aimi Kobayashi

For his sixth and latest Deutsche Grammophon album, pianist Seong-Jin Cho returns to the music of Frédéric Chopin with Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 2 · Scherzi. The album is set for international release on 27 August 2021 and features these best-loved works in interpretations characterised by thoughtful poetry and youthful ardour. For the concerto, Seong-Jin Cho teams up with the London Symphony Orchestra and Gianandrea Noseda, a conductor with whom he has enjoyed a productive and stimulating collaboration over the past five years.

When Pogorelich did not make the finals of the 1980 Warsaw Competition (where they play exclusively Chopin), his response was to sign with Deutsche Grammophon for his first recording and he made it an all-Chopin affair. From his stunning opening take on Chopin's Sonata #2, to a Funeral March restored to its grandeur, to the breaktaking final moments of the Scherzo #3, Pogorelich announced to the music world that he'd arrived.

Chopin’s mazurkas are perhaps the most elusive branch of his output. Their most obvious and dangerous challenges to performers lie in their rhythmic subtlety. Of all his music, none is more intimately linked with the accents and inflections of the Polish language, but this isn’t to say that only Poles can do them justice. What they do require, though, is a rhythmic buoyancy and flexibility of line which transcends all national characteristics. Like Chopin himself, they are compounded of irony and paradox. The role of the second beat is crucial to all of them, and to their specific identity as dance music (though Chopin’s were never intended for dancing), yet if they’re to succeed in performance the pianist must neutralise the divisive menace of the bar-line, so that the last thing we think of is counting.

Firma Melodiya continues the series of compact discs dedicated to December Evenings Festival that takes place at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. This album, like the previous one, is dedicated to the 1985 festival World of Romanticism and includes recordings featuring Sviatoslav Richter. The atmosphere of December Evenings, an event initiated by the great pianist, differed from usual philharmonic concerts. The spirit of music as an inseparable part of "fusion of arts" the romanticists dreamt of was invisibly felt in each number; a sensitive listener can catch it in these, perhaps technically imperfect, concert recordings from thirty years ago. The works by Schubert, Schumann and Chopin were performed by Sviatoslav Richter in ensemble with his outstanding contemporaries, violinist and David Oistrakh's student Oleg Kogan who passed away prematurely, violist Yuri Bashmet, cellist Natalia Gutman and clarinettist Anatoly Kamyshov.

For her Chopin debut on MDG (MDG9471818), Jin Ju was awarded the highest honors from the top authorities: the jury of the Grand Prix du Disque Frédéric Chopin. It is only every five years that these guardians of the Chopin legacy come together to distinguish a mere four extraordinary recordings. Now this Chinese pianist blessed with a special interpretive sense celebrates her induction into this illustrious circle with a continuation of recordings for MDG.

This two-disc set, one of numerous crossover collections released by the Decca/Universal family of labels, bears the name of Russian pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy only in small print at the end of the list of pieces included. Newcomers to classical music can rest assured that they're getting a two-for-one bonus by purchasing Essential Chopin – not only an introduction to the Polish-French composer who helped elevate the small solo piano work to the pinnacle of musical art, but also a sampling of the talents of one of the great keyboard artists of our own time. Ashkenazy rumbles with power on the more extended Ballades and the "Revolutionary" Etude in C minor, Op. 10/2, while Chopin's lighter dance-rhythm pieces and lyrical Nocturnes sparkle under Ashkenazy's effortless hands.

Maria João Pires “shapes and colours every phrase, and with immaculate taste, and she makes sure the phrases end as eloquently as they begin,” wrote Gramophone in 1974. “She conveys not just the details but the relevance of every note to the whole … Best of all, she communicates everything she has discovered about the music, and it is worth having.” This Portuguese pupil of Wilhelm Kempff, Pires was one of the artists who defined the Erato label in the 1970s and 1980s. This 5-CD box gathers together the recordings she made over the period from 1976 to 1985 and it reflects the consistent focus of her repertoire, with its special emphasis on Austro-German composers of the Classical and early-Romantic periods. Embracing solo works, piano duets and concertos, it contains works by Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven, but also by Bach and Chopin.

This 6CD set charts not only the development of the Nocturne as a musical form, but also the development of the piano from the closing years of the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. Two great ‘piano schools’ had emerged, each having some of the greatest performers and composers of the day associated with them. Some of these composers were highly successful businessmen as well – Clementi and Pleyel in particular established highly successful piano manufacturing and music publishing firms. The English school, with its powerful instruments (of which the pianos of John Broadwood and Co are the best examples) enabled London based composers such as Cramer, Clementi and Dussek to write music with a singing almost bel canto quality.

A wonderful idea brilliantly executed, Bart van Oort's four-disc set entitled The Art of the Nocturne is not only an in-depth examination of one of the most romantic of romantic musical forms, but also a really sexy set of seduction discs that cannot fail to warm even the coldest heart. The first disc in Oort's survey includes all the elegantly expressive Nocturnes of Irish-Russian composer John Field, the second and third discs include all the supremely sensual Nocturnes of Polish-French composer Frédéric Chopin, and the fourth disc includes individual Nocturnes by various contemporaries of Chopin, of whom the best known are Clara Schumann and Charles-Valentin Alkan and the least known is Ignacy Feliks Dobrzynski.

Esteemed for almost 60 years as one of the greatest Chopin interpreters, Maurizio Pollini confirms his preeminence with this 2017 release on Deutsche Grammophon, and offers his first all-Chopin disc since 2012. Chopin's late works were composed between 1845 and 1849, and include the Barcarolle in F sharp major, Op. 60, the 3 Mazurkas, Op. 59, the Polonaise-Fantaisie in A flat major, Op. 61, the 2 Nocturnes, Op. 62, the 3 Mazurkas, Op. 63, the 3 Waltzes, Op. 64, and the Mazurka in F minor, Op. Posth. 68, No. 4; they are notable for their harmonic richness and freedom of melodic embellishment, characteristics that made them especially influential among his Romantic contemporaries. Pollini's fluid phrasing and control of expression and dynamics have always given his performances sophistication and a feeling of balance, though these are engaging renditions that are far from cerebral or clinical, claims that critics have sometimes laid at Pollini's door. Yet listeners can hear for themselves how polished and deeply felt these performances are, and appreciate the artistic wholeness of Pollini's conceptions, from the elegance of the "Minute" Waltz to the sublime melancholy of the posthumous Mazurka in F minor. Highly recommended for fans of great piano music.

Paul Ji, winner of the Prodiges competition in 2019, is a 16-year old pianist, born in Chicago, USA to a Chinese family and raised in France since the age of five. This album, contains a selection of 16 romantic masterpieces for the piano.

Behzod Abduraimov joins Alpha for several recordings, starting with this kaleidoscope of miniatures miniatures that are in fact fairly gigantic, and showcase the Uzbek pianists extreme virtuosity and sensitivity. Each movement is in itself a miniature, and taken together they form a kaleidoscope of human emotions and images of all kinds, says Behzod Abduraimov. In his view, the pieces in Debussys Childrens Corner are not intended for young piano students, but for adults, so that they can immerse themselves in the world of children with a little nostalgia and a lot of humor. When it comes to Chopin, each prelude has a different musical essence, creates its own atmosphere.

At the gala concert 2009, the Berliner Philharmoniker under its musical director Sir Simon Rattle and Lang Lang present works by two Russian composers. Sergei Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, one of his most enduring popular pieces, demands a virtuoso pianist and a huge supple orchestral sound. Both it gets from the world famous Berliner Philharmoniker and the very gifted soloist Lang Lang. “The Nutcracker” by Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky, perhaps the most popular of all ballets, completes the programme.