Secrets: Chopin’s Mature Piano Works is a Pure DSD 256 recording featuring pianist László Borbély. Exclusively Available in Pure DSD at NativeDSD. 

Why Chopin impresses his listeners and performers again and again is beyond explanation. However, as I wrote in the liner notes to this album, for me the relationship with Chopin is a highly ambivalent one. The reason for this lies perhaps most of all in Frédéric Chopin’s endlessly complex personality. For Chopin, in contrast to the mainstream of his time, does nothing other than defy musical public opinion (public taste?), but he always does so, cryptically speaking, with his starting point being a far-reaching respect for and, above all, knowledge of the traditions (especially Bach and Mozart). And this is obvious if we consider that Chopin’s music always strives for absolute harmony, which he fights for again and again.

But Chopin’s struggle is very different from the heroic, titanic struggles of many of his contemporaries. Chopin’s power is all-pervasive, and that is what impresses us, whether or not we consider ourselves to be classical music lovers. Chopin’s music, then, simultaneously seeks to be still and yet still in motion. With him, nothing is ever ‘ready’, or, to put it somewhat more abstractly, to allude to the foregoing, his art is itself a mapping of the limits, of instability.

His work is always imbued with an improvisatory spirit, a desire to celebrate the moment. Chopin must therefore never be performed with an academic style. And although there are many legendary recordings of the works on this disc, this does not make the performer’s task any easier, but rather it should make him feel all the more empowered to reveal Chopin’s musical language, and above all its underlying content, never with the arrogance of exposure, but with the sanctity of friendly secrecy.

László Borbély, Piano