In his new album, pianist Janne Mertanen returns to the polonaises of Frédéric Chopin. Chopin - Polonaises brings together the essential works of his mature period, tracing a path from court tradition to political agitation and formal freedom.

The polonaise emerged in 16th-century Poland as a stately court dance, opening royal festivities with a dignified processional. Like the waltz and mazurka, it is in 3/4, but its distinctive emphasis on the second beat gives it a majestic, sometimes military stride. By the 18th century it had entered the concert hall, a form cultivated by composers such as J.S. Bach, Beethoven and Weber.

For Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849), however, the polonaise was more than a courtly genre: it was a musical connection to Poland. His earliest compositions were polonaises, while works such as the Grande polonaise brillante, Op. 22, offered virtuoso entertainment to European audiences. News of Warsaw's uprising against Russia in 1830 and the city's fall transformed Chopin's planned concert tour into permanent exile in Paris. Born of longing, loss and an awakened political consciousness, the mature polonaises of 1835-1846 move from darkness to light, formal constraint to freedom, and lived reality to timeless idealism. They speak with the force of both a statesmanlike thinker and an eloquent agitator.