In the $5 bin at Walmart yesterday I found a two disc CD of Fréderick Chopin - more Chopin that you can shake a stick at. It's spectacular.
Chopin, of course, died very young. Looking at the play list on the CDs - and watching this entire recital played by Daniel Barenboim himself - makes me wonder what else would have ended up on the CDs if he'd lived another 30 (or 40) years. This is perhaps the greatest tragedy in all of Classical Music - recognized as such at the time, with Eugène Delacroix himself carrying Chopin's coffin to its burial in Paris' Père Lachaise cemetery. A melancholy thought on a rainy Sunday Morning.
3 comments:
Just back from Youtube to watch the performance in full screen. It is amazing that someone can do what he does. And he remembers the music without it in front of him! What a repertoire, and an amazing feat of dexterity, memory and skill.
Great class as always. I have Chopin pieces done by Ashkenazy, and will now go off to Amazon for some Barenboim.
That feller shore can play that pianer.
I got my intro to classical music from the 1.99 bin at a Sulphur, LA Wal-mart many years ago. Still have the CD's. A Carl Orff compilation and Wagner's 'Tristan and Isolde'. It was like an 101 class in bombast, but made for amazing mood music on a ship's bridge in shit weather. Now that I don't often leave sight of land it's gathering dust, but still got me into the genre. I enjoy filling my knowledge gap on your Sunday posts, so... gracias!
"more than you can shake a stick at"? Barenboim? You are obviously young in the ways of the Force.
Artur Rubinstein's the man for you.
Go over to Amazon (on Tam's link, of course) and get the Rubinstein Chopin box set. Which is most of what Chopin wrote, but not everything. You want the RCA set, and not the EMI set, which was recorded in the 1930s with not very good sound and includes far less material. Rubinstein's RCA set includes some of the best Chopin recordings ever made, in the opinion of some people (the most important of whom is me).
If you want everything Chopin wrote--which is a lot more than 2 CDs worth, look for DG's Complete Chopin Edition, which doesn't have Rubinstein but does have a goodly chunk of other great pianists, and has everything Chopin wrote. Of course, everything Chopin wrote includes a bunch of Polish art songs (no accordions involved), so decide how much you want Polish art songs before you get that set.
Since I don't like Polish art songs very much, I don't have the set myself, but I do have many of the recordings from which it was compiled.
And remember that you can never have too many Chopin recordings (so long as they're not Polish art songs).
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