Not very forthcoming as a person, Chopin reserved for the piano alone the secret – rather than the confidences or confessions – of his inner being. It is as if the piano were his double, resonating in harmony with his sensibility and receiving his feelings, his impressions, even his hallucinations.

In these short pieces, where his harmonic sensitivity enables him to create a particular treatment of sonority to produce the most delicate shimmerings and the finest nuances, he invents a new type of touch, able to render the immaterial, to encompass absolute limpidity, and the full gamut of modern pianism.

In addition the versions collected here are all performed by the greatest artists of our catalogue.