Chopin: Wilde Plays Chopin, Vol III

"Wilde's burning sincerity makes for compulsive if exhausting listening. He has again written his own notes, is excellently recorded, and if you like Chopin given with a steep and original slant…then this is for you."--Gramophone

The reviews that greeted Vol II of David Wilde’s Chopin last year spoke of his playing as ‘vast, monumental, inexorable…a wealth of colour and detail, all in service of an overarching design of crystal clarity’ (International Record Review).

Wilde, wrote Bryce Morrison in Gramophone, ‘scorns all easy facility,’ presenting Chopin not as the familiar salon dandy but as ‘an epic, gnarled and rugged genius shaking his fist at the universe with all the defiance of King Lear’. BBC Radio 3’s CD Review concurred: ‘The space that he gives the music is extraordinary…This is on a grand scale.’ Here is a further instalment of this extraordinary Chopin journey. As he sat down to record the B flat minor Scherzo, Wilde said to Delphian producer Paul Baxter: ‘I’ve been playing this piece for 73 years – I don’t think I need a score!’ This is Chopin absorbed and reshaped: the radical expressive outcome of a lifetime’s involvement with this inexhaustible composer.