Chopin - The Complete Mazurkas | Sound Circus SCCD21705

Chopin - The Complete Mazurkas

Label: Sound Circus

Cat No: SCCD21705

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 2

Genre: Instrumental

Release Date: 26th May 2017

Contents

Artists

Joanna MacGregor (piano)

Works

Chopin, Frederic

Mazurkas (57)

Artists

Joanna MacGregor (piano)

About

Schumann called Chopin's mazurkas "canons buried in flowers", a synthesis of Polish folk culture, nostalgia, poetry and political defiance. Performed chronologically they portray a subtle and confessional diary of a transcendent, innovative composer.

A lifetime's study for any pianist, Joanna MacGregor peels back the layers of one of the greatest collections of piano literature. For Joanna, this has been a very personal journey: "I've loved Chopin's mazurkas since childhood; I can think of no other collection that reveals a composer so intimately. Soulful, witty, and often dramatic, they can be experienced in a multiplicity of ways: as a diary of Chopin's life; as his laboratory for compositional ideas; as a testimony to Polish culture, and his elegant improvisation."

Recorded in the Britten Theatre at Snape Maltings, Joanna also performed them in their entirety at the Wigmore Hall on 12 May 2017.

"I've taken the simple decision to record and perform all fifty-seven in order of composition, and to follow the intense unfolding of a composer returning to the same place again and again: from Chopin's first mazurka to his last."

As a student, Joanna clearly recalls hearing Horowitz perform in London in 1982: "I slept outside the Royal Festival Hall to be sure of getting a ticket. Of all the pieces he played at his recital, the miraculous Op.17 No.4 is the most vivid memory. Chopin's porous, unresolved fluidity in these works has inspired so pianists; his mazurkas a witness to human vulnerability and longing."

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