Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849)

Complete Piano Music Vol. 14
Piano Concertos

Relatively early in his career Chopin realised that he excelled in performance of more intimate delicacy than was generally possible in the concert hall. Nevertheless in a world that still made little distinction between composer and performer, he provided himself with compositions for piano and orchestra with which to make his name at the start of his career. It was only once he had established himself in Paris in the l830s that he turned rather to the kind of playing that he made so much his own, performances that demanded great technical proficiency, but made no attempt to impress, as Liszt and Kalkbrenner did, by displays of sound and fury.

Born in Warsaw in 1810, the son of a French émigré father and a Polish mother, Chopin studied with the director of the Warsaw Conservatory, at first as a private pupil and later as a full-time student. At home he had alrea