Fryderyk Franciszek ChopinChopin: Etudes Op 10 & Op 25

A liked these performances.

Bra

My last copy of this cd got damaged because I often listened in the car. It wasn't restored by cleaning so I had to buy it again for the wonderful performance by Pollini.

Excellent sound quality.

Excellent product worth waiting for

Excellent

Maurizio Pollini has one great asset, which has not been stressed enough - with all his wonderful technique of piano playing, he makes the music as accessible as possible to 'ordinary' listeners. Although this 'textbook' approach, according to some, lacks emotion, it's not really true. Rather, playing each note as it should be played, adds much value to the overall impact of the performance.This advantage of his playing makes Pollini an ideal interpreter of Chopin's Etudes. All the tempos are in the right place, all the difficult passages are infused with just a correct dose of feeling. My only reservations is to the works as such - for me, the first 12 Etudes, Op. 10, are a typical, glorious Chopin stuff. The second half (Op. 25) is full of more obscure, not really attractive compositions - probably my least favorite of Chopin's oeuvre. It remains a mystery to me, why the late Etudes are such (especially when comparing this to the fact that the later Nocturnes are more introspective and later Polonaises more profound and beautiful, for example). Still, Pollini plays all of them exquisitely - especially No. 3 in F is as perfect as can be.

I really can't understand how anyone can give this recording less than 5 stars. Not only is Pollini's playing technically impeccable, but to say it lacks anything in passion or emotional impact is outright absurd: to listen to Pollini's performance of Op. 10, No. 12 and not feel the fire and urgency in his playing is to be incapable of feeling anything, period.There are any number of performers who sacrifice all depth of feeling on the altar of showy virtuosity, but Maurizio Pollini on this particular recording is certainly not one of them. His handling of the Etudes makes, to my mind, for a healthy contrast with Martha Argerich's celebrated (but emotionally unsatisfying) rendering of Chopin's Preludes; Pollini and Argerich are both virtuosos, but where Argerich gallops through the preludes as if on a race to get somewhere else, squeezing all the feeling out of them in the process, Pollini does not let a desire to dazzle us with his abilities interfere with an interpretation of Chopin's compositions as the artist would have intended. In short, here is a recording which is about as far from "machine-like" as it is possible to get, and which proves that no choice need be made between getting things technically and emotionally correct.