Chopin: The Complete Waltzes
$30.00
Pre-order nowAvailable: Apr 11 add to cart
FREDERIC CHOPIN
Chopin: The Complete Waltzes
Stephen Hough (piano)
[ Hyperion / CD ]
Release Date: Friday 11 April 2025
Pre-order your copy NOW!
Stephen Hough's 2011 album of Chopin's waltzes once more regains its 'complete' status with the inclusion of the 'Valse' found in a New York library in 2024. Yet further incentive to acquire some Chopin of 'authority and panache … understanding and poised mastery', as The Guardian greeted the album's initial release.
Stephen Hough's account of the complete waltzes of Chopin has long been considered a favourite version of these much-recorded works. A commercial and critical success since its release in 2011, it is reissued in April 2025-and with a very special reason. In the spring of 2024 a postcard-sized music manuscript was discovered in New York's Morgan Library & Museum. Written in Chopin's hand, the manuscript contained a previously unknown 'Valse'. A lost Chopin waltz? Hough's recording of the piece and its addition to his album of the composer's waltzes-now once again genuinely complete-gives listeners the opportunity to enjoy a 'new' work by Chopin.
"Hough's playing has such authority and panache, its balance between virtuosity and vividly communicated expression so finely judged, that every perfectly scaled moment is as intensely realised as every other. Few other pianists around today play Chopin with as much understanding and poised mastery as this." The Guardian, 21st July 2011 *****
"one sense how sensitive he is to Chopin's variety, in a corpus of music not generally recognised as being so various...He can charm and beguile, and be bold in his contrasts, but he gets on with it, and it is the music he gives us, with true sentiments, and not merely a take on received ideas. And what a lovely sound he makes - on a Yamaha, excellently recorded in a concert-hall acoustic."
(Gramophone Award Finalist 2012)
Tracks:
Piano Waltzes Nos. 1 - 20
Nocturne No. 2 in E flat major, Op. 9 No. 2
Chopin: Waltz in A minor 'Morgan Library & Museum MS'
