A dream comes true. A secret garden is reborn, with its luxuriant and intimate colours, its intoxicating perfumes, under the fingers of François-Frédéric Guy.

For his first-ever recording of music by Chopin, François-Frédéric Guy has chosen a 1905 Pleyel piano, a sublime instrument restored at the workshop of Pianos Balleron.

The pieces on this album remind Guy of the music that enchanted his childhood. Yet it was a long wait until he finally took the opportunity provided by the lockdown to make this recording in the splendid acoustics of the Arsenal de Metz.

Of course, this pianist, so passionate a champion of the music of today, is not one to renounce the revolutionary dimension of Chopin’s style. It laid the foundations of the modern piano repertory.

Nevertheless, François-Frédéric Guy’s poetic imagination combines fantasy and rigour in his phrasing, in dialogue with the unique and bewitching timbres of his instrument.

This recital, paying homage to the master pianists of the early twentieth century, revives an art of singing in a way that seems utterly natural, such is the clarity and fluidity of the playing.