LDV98-9

Should we see in this recording the expression of a lost love, a ‘forbidden’ love? There’s probably an element of that. I’ve repeatedly postponed the decision to tackle this musical universe in the recording studio, and finally taking the plunge might well be an act of auto-psychoanalysis . . . When I was a boy, I used to hear my father, a cultivated amateur pianist, play Chopin’s music every day. I still have his scores, coloured with forests of fingerings. I discovered this music on the piano with my first teacher, Lucienne Bloch, who had studied with Michelangeli. She had a special knowledge of Chopin’s style, the art of expressing a singing melody inspired by bel canto, of revealing the ‘little notes’, not forgetting the question of rubato, which cannot be stereotyped or mannered: Liszt famously compared it to the leaves of a tree which quiver in the wind without the trunk ever moving. When I played Chopin during my prentice years, I soon heard the words: ‘That’s not it at all!’ That rather encouraged me to set the scores aside, even though some of them have always remained in my repertoire, such as the Polonaise-Fantaisie , whose oxymoronic title suggests contradictions that fascinate me. 15 FRANÇOIS-FRÉDÉRIC GUY