Chopin on Pleyel 1847.

In the tonally vague opening of the Mazurka no. 4 in B-flat minor op. 24, Rutkowski captures the mood of chromatic restlessness, without losing the larger shape. Hubert Rutkowski pf Piano Classics 10129, 2018 (1 CD: 63 minutes) Treatises, epistolary records, period instruments and their replicas all have parts to play in recovering how a given repertoire (might have) sounded in the past - I wie es eigentlich gewesen i , as Leopold Ranke famously exhorted. I find his reference to "so-called Chopin style" (p. 4) in this regard curiously sceptical given his aesthetic concerns and his recommended performance practices, based on understanding how Chopin played his own music, on studying a variety of editions, and, of course, on playing period instruments. [Extracted from the article]