Dejan Lazić - Chopin: Retrospection (2000)

At first glance, it would appear that Chopin’s musical powers were concentrated exclusively on the piano; but when one devotes attention to the deepest levels of the music composed by this poet and virtuoso of the piano, then one realizes that his works can also be categorized as orchestral, chamber music-inspired, or as songs with accompaniment. His highly personal and daring harmonies, underlined by great rhythmic diversity, already point the way to impressionism, and show how far Chopin was in advance of his own times. For me it was a special challenge to record a Chopin retrospective right after the Mozart retrospective. There is hardly any other pair of composers who are at the same time so similar and so different. Both composed rapidly and effortlessly in the course of their short lives, and their music is direct and transparent. But Mozart was creative in every aspect of music, while Chopin was someone for whom the piano was ‘all in one’….With every compositional form I endeavor to preserve Chopin’s improvisatory spontaneity. This cd includes works from different creative periods in the composer’s life, but all the compositions have something in common: patriotism, numerous elements from folk music, and in his later works, longing for his native Poland.