In June 1989 Idil Biret received an offer from the then newly established Naxos label to record Chopin’s complete works for piano solo and for piano and orchestra. Without hesitation she accepted to undertake this monumental task. This was a project that would be the dream and dread of many a pianist and the past decades were full of projects to record Chopin’s complete works which remained unfinished for various reasons. Idil Biret was not known as a Chopin performer. Indeed until she started recording for Naxos she had played few of his works in public. During much of her career she had stayed distant from Chopin. Later, Biret studied with Alfred Cortot, considered by many as the greatest Chopin interpreter of the twentieth century, for two years when he was in his eighties. With him Biret worked on almost the entire Chopin repertory. Cortot’s teachings were in the great tradition of Chopin performance of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Biret remembers vividly “the glorious, magical sounds that came from the piano when Cortot put his hands on it; almost like that of a cello” as she recalled in an interview on BBC Radio. This release is a reissue of Naxos’s original Fryderyk Chopin complete piano music recorded by Idil Biret.
