The concept album that a buyer might expect from the title The Mazurka Diary isn't explicitly delivered here; the title refers to Gourari's general sentiment, expressed in her portion of the booklet notes in German and English, that "for me, Chopin's mazurkas are more than dances or stylized dance music, and represent something like a musical diary which contains childhood memories as well as worldly wisdom, longings, dreams of love, despair, resignation, and presentiments of death. Indeed, dying itself." Annotator Bernhard ...
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The concept album that a buyer might expect from the title The Mazurka Diary isn't explicitly delivered here; the title refers to Gourari's general sentiment, expressed in her portion of the booklet notes in German and English, that "for me, Chopin's mazurkas are more than dances or stylized dance music, and represent something like a musical diary which contains childhood memories as well as worldly wisdom, longings, dreams of love, despair, resignation, and presentiments of death. Indeed, dying itself." Annotator Bernhard Neuhoff adds a history of Chopin's mazurkas, chiming in with the idea that they form an "intimate diary." Their special status in this regard apparently comes from the fact that they're distinctively Polish, but not in a way that the polonaise was, and Chopin himself said he had to "coax mazurkas out of my conflict-ridden heart." It's all a bit vague, but the young Russian pianist Anna Gourari pulls it off. Large groups of mazurkas do work well together on a recording; the mazurka...
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Add this copy of Chopin: The Mazurka Diary to cart. $13.76, Sold by New England Booksellers rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Greenfield, MA, UNITED STATES, published 2010 by Berlin Classics.
