The reviews that greeted Vol II of David Wilde’s Chopin last year spoke of his playing as ‘vast, monumental, inexorable … a wealth of colour and detail, all in service of an overarching design of crystal clarity’ (International Record Review). Wilde, wrote Bryce Morrison in Gramophone, ‘scorns all easy facility,’ presenting Chopin not as the familiar salon dandy but as ‘an epic, gnarled and rugged genius shaking his fist at the universe with all the defiance of King Lear’. BBC Radio 3’s CD Review concurred: ‘The space that he gives the music is extraordinary … This is on a grand scale.’ Here is a further instalment of this extraordinary Chopin journey. As he sat down to record the B flat minor Scherzo, Wilde said to Delphian producer Paul Baxter: ‘I’ve been playing this piece for 73 years – I don’t think I need a score!’ This is Chopin absorbed and reshaped: the radical expressive outcome of a lifetime’s involvement with this inexhaustible composer.

Praise

‘Wilde’s burning sincerity makes for compulsive if exhausting listening. He has again written his own notes, is excellently recorded, and if you like Chopin given with a steep and original slant … then this is for you’
— Gramophone Magazine

‘David Wilde lives up to his name. The octogenarian pianist does not do glossy or pretty — instead, this final volume of his Chopin series is a full-on blast of volatile extroversion. Wilde’s piano twangs and growls; rubato comes in enormous swells; chordal passages are delivered with craggy, uncompromising attack’
— The Guardian

‘I have to urge any Chopin enthusiast to listen to this. There is nothing else like it’
— MusicWeb International

Track Listing

Nocturne in C minor, Op. 48 No. 1
Étude in E major, Op. 10 No. 3
Valse in C sharp minor, Op. 64 No. 2
Valse in D flat major, Op. 64 No. 1 ‘Minute Waltz’
Scherzo No 2 in B flat minor, Op. 31
Polonaise in F sharp minor, Op. 44
Valse in A minor, Op. 34 No. 2
Mazurka in B flat major, Op. 7 No. 1
Mazurka in A minor, Op. 7 No. 2
3 Écossaises, Op. 72 No. 3 (No 1 in D; No 2 in G; No 3 in G flat)
Polonaise in A major, Op. 40 No. 1 ‘Military’
Valse in A flat major, Op. 69 No. 1