Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 11/13/2019, uploaded on 04/03/2020

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

[From the notes to a concert during which Mr. Tokarski played a nocturne, three mazurkas and a Scherzo]

Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin was the greatest Polish composer, born in the village of Żelazowa Wola. Chopin was primarily interested in writing for piano solo and made many significant innovations to the piano sonata, mazurka, waltz, nocturne, polonaise, etude, impromptu, scherzo, and prelude. Chopin’s works represent the very best of piano music and are an inspiration to every aspiring young pianist.

Nocturnes:

"Songs of the night", "piano bel canto": such is how Chopin's nocturnes are usually described. They are piano miniatures among the most well known and most beautiful of Chopin's works. The nocturne, perfectly suited to the mood of the era, evokes with its very name romantic images of the night, the moon, and all the shades of lyrical and dramatic expression associated with them.

Mazurkas:

Chopin composed mazurkas virtually throughout his life. These miniatures came to form a weighty tome of the composer's most personal musical utterances, a lyrical ‘journal' of his life. It is perhaps in the mazurkas, more than in any other works, that Chopin allows the listener into his "heart's sanctuary". Alongside the polonaises, they are the most "Polish" of Chopin's works.

Scherzo:

The scherzo appeared on the threshold of the Baroque era, initially as a vocal-instrumental genre of a cheerful character. Chopin rendered the genre autonomous, expanded it considerably and lent it a new, Romantic expression-startling, supremely dramatic, creating the impression of extraordinariness, the dimension of tragedy, and a shiver of terror.                              Notes by Artur Bielecki

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.