Search - Frederic Chopin, Antoni Wit, Warsaw Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra :: Chopin: Complete Works for Piano & Orchestra

Kun-Woo Paik, Antoni Wit, WarsawPO: Chopin P & Orch Works Co

Dan Fee | Berkeley, CA USA | 05/02/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a two disc set of the complete Chopin piano music with orchestra. The competition is stiff, including famed Claudio Arrau (London Philharmonic, Eliahu Inbal), Chopin Prize Laureate Garrick Ohlsson (Warsaw, Kasimierz Kord, or Polish National, Jerzy Maksymiuk), beloved Nadia Boulanger protegè Idil Biret (Slovak State Kosice, Robert Stankowksy), Alexis Weissenberg (OSDCDC, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski), ... The short list has nearly a reading for every season.



Then add in stellar readings of the first (plus or minus, the second) Chopin concertos. Now the sky is afire with myriad bright musical stars. All shining royally in their own orbits. We really have a musical interpretation for every season. Maybe even for every micro-climate.



Soloists range from the really big and really famous (like Artur Rubinstein, Martha Argerich, Emil Gilels, a prescient 12-year old Yevgeny Kissin bearing his profoundly musical cups right up to the gods' tables on Olympus as he channels revelation in Moscow in 1984, Jorge Bolet, Kristian Zimmerman, Murray Perahia, Maurizio Pollini, Boris Berezovsky or others); to darker horse famous names, present and past (like Brazilian Guiomar Novaes, Abbey Simon, Cyprus keyboard poet Martino Tirimo, Earl Wild, Rubinstein protegè Dubravka Tomsic, Uzbekistani Anna Malikova, South African keyboard wizard Stephen de Groote, Nicolai Demedenko, Samson Francois, Christian Zacharias, Vladimir Ashkenzy, Van Cliburn or others).



Competition for this complete set is: lots, lots, lots, lots.



Even restricting myself to recent releases and discoveries I get Lang Lang and Yundi Li and Fou Ts'ong - right next to this newest release from Kun-woo Paik. (Yes, I kept all of them.) And I think I will be keeping Paik, too.



Part of the appeal of this set is the warm, flexible partnering that Antoni Wit and the Warsaw band manage to offer throughout. I know that the young Chopin's orchestra is frequently accused of callow inexperience, a stiff adolescent musical social manner, and unimaginatively doubled-up instrumental thickness. Yet one would hardly know these complaints existed, if we just listened to Antoni Wit and the Warsaw players in this two-disc set. They don't approach any of the band's music as beneath them; neither shall we when listening.



After sitting through both discs, I still find myself prizing the first piano concerto (written second in real sequence) above all the rest of the set. The terrible test to my ears is always that chiming of bells in the slow second movement, when the soloist is floating on the orchestra music that has just born him or her aloft, only to fade away. Your playing is naked in such moments. You are playing alone, but you are burdened with immediate musical history - your point making must extend just where all the other players have now left off, and yet you must also convey the melancholy and sweetness and solitude that Chopin always seems to have written into all his music.



The reason I'm keeping this set, no doubt, is that Kun-woo wins me over in that supreme moment. Just like the ringing bell clarities in the recorded bel canto singing of Amelita Galli-Curci, Jenny Lind, or Lily Pons. All the other moments, too. Paik's touch is silvery, his tone not all that big resounding (at least, if you compare him to the likes of Claudio Arrau or Jorge Bolet or Gina Bachauer or Rudolf Firkusny). Every last drop is precious metal on fragrant sandalwood on plush velvet dark spaces, however; so the sort of special music that Paik molds from his basic physicality, that is the engraved musical calling card of individual mastery that may permit him entry to your own personal crowd of lasting favorites. Sitting through this whole set, one is not surprised to read that he was laureate of both the Naumberg and Busoni piano competitions, nor that he made his debut at ten years old, in Seoul, Korea by playing the Grieg piano concerto. Somebody who can play this well probably should have, would have been noticed, long before now.



I guess we are in remarkable good luck that Amazon is even listing this set, now. Paik's Rachmaninoff is nowhere to be found in the markets I've searched so far. A pity, that gap. After hearing his Chopin I am intensely curious to hear what he does with Rachmaninoff. Paik seems not to play all that much in USA, except maybe for the Ravinia and Mostly Mozart Festivals. But, the labels are doing us a bad turn by neglecting to distribute him all that well to USA markets. Thanks to Amazon, then, for the releases that are available.



I'm already awaiting his Ravel concertos. My next shopper's click will probably be on his disc of Bach-Busoni transcriptions. I just got the Beethoven piano sonatas, 16-26. I'm looking for the remaining two Beethoven volumes.



Recommended, for clear, sophisticated keyboard enchantment. Paik lives in Paris, and the refinement and subtlety he displays in Chopin would tend to suggest him as a surprise Korean embodiment of the classic French school. Abbey Simon is his closest kin in Chopin playing, and that is saying a whole lot. He gets tremendous, involved help from Warsaw and Antoni Wit. The sound is very good, red book stereo. The little symbol I should insert here to wrap it up would be something like Charles Schultz' Snoopy doing his Happy Dance."