Daniel Barenboim – The Warsaw Recital

Chopin Year 2010 coincided with the 60th anniversary of Daniel Barenboim’s stage début, and as a pianist he had decided to devote this year to the great Romantic master of the keyboard. Fryderyc Chopin was born on 1 March 1810 in a small village near Warsaw, and on the eve of the 200th anniversary of this date Barenboim gave this wildly acclaimed Warsaw recital as part of an extensive European tour. Recorded live at the National Philharmonic Hall, Warsaw, the programme presents some of the composer’s best-known works, including the great B flat minor Sonata with its famous Funeral March, which sounded to many “as the composer may well have imagined it”.

“I’ve been playing Chopin ever since I was a little boy. On the advice of my father, who was also my teacher, I performed some of his pieces in my very first concert, when I was just seven. At that point I was playing the Etudes and the Nocturnes – obviously I didn’t try and tackle the larger – scale Sonatas or the Fantasy until later. I only really immersed myself in Chopin’s music in my late teens and from then on I played it a lot … I began again just a few years ago, rediscovering that great passion, and I have to say that when I play Chopin I feel a kind of purely physical pleasure that I get from no other composer’s music.” Daniel Barenboim