Search - Chopin, Planes, Alain Plaines :: Chopin: Preludes / Planes

The piano that Alain Planès uses here, a 1906 American Steinway grand, is credited with all sorts of marvelous qualities by Jacques Drillon in a typically florid note tucked into the booklet that accompanies this CD. The fact is, it's an instrument that lacks the weight in the bass and the brilliance at the top that characterize today's concert Steinways--a Bing Crosby of a piano rather than a Lauritz Melchior, which is fine. Its touch is light, and that enables Planès to get around on some of the flashier pieces in the set, like No. 8 in F sharp minor and No. 16 in B flat minor. Still, his isn't what you would be tempted to call a virtuosic technique, and if you're looking for flash and color, you might be better off looking somewhere else, say Pollini, or better, Pogorelich. What Planès brings to these pieces is an introspective delicacy that is very much in the French tradition. His readings of the individual preludes are thoughtful and tasteful, if not always telling. He does not chain them together (as, for example, Garrick Ohlsson does) to form a continuous utterance, but sees them as individual entities, and with good reason. For these are the most modern pieces Chopin wrote--aphoristic, even cryptic. In fact, many of them are not pieces at all, but, as the poet Alfred de Vigny might have said, "pearls of thought." Planès understands that, and communicates it as well as anyone. --Ted Libbey