Internationally acclaimed Swedish pianist Peter Jablonski is known as a fervent champion of Polish music. In this album Jablonski returns to some of his dearest piano music – Chopin’s Mazurkas. For Chopin, the Mazurkas became a deeply personal, intimate statement of his feelings as an émigré Polish composer living in Paris. From some of his very first compositions to his last, it is the only form that Chopin composed regularly throughout his life. Similarly, Chopin’s Mazurkas have followed Peter Jablonski throughout his entire career as a pianist in nearly every solo recital.

This new album includes Chopin’s first 29 numbered Mazurkas mainly written between 1830 and 1839. Chopin himself assembled mazurkas in opuses meant for publication, with a dramaturgical concept that emerges clearly already from Op. 17, undergoes development in Op. 24, and reaches its peak in Op. 41, often considered to be the most cohesive set of all. Chopin balances moods and tempi relationships between the pieces in each set more and more carefully. Interestingly, Chopin almost never used authentic folk material, but created folk-like themes of his own. Chopin gave very clear indications in his scores, but never played his own works in the same way twice. He told his students to put their soul into the music they were playing, to trust their own musical intuition. To him, it was important to find the essence of the work, to allow it to live and breathe. The mazurkas demand elegance, spirit, careful attention to tempi, colours, rubato (the elusive mazurka lilt), dynamics, and pedalling. In his mazurkas Chopin found a way to be at his most personal, vulnerable, and intimate. One might say that they are his musical diary.

Peter Jablonski is an internationally acclaimed Swedish pianist. Discovered by Claudio Abbado and Vladimir Ashkenazy and signed by Decca at the age of 17, he went on to perform, collaborate, and record with over 150 of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors, including the Philharmonia, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Mariinsky, La Scala Philharmonic, Tonhalle Zurich, Orchestre Nationale de France, NHK Tokyo, DSO Berlin, Warsaw Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Valery Gergiev, Kurt Sanderling, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Riccardo Chailly, Daniele Gatti, and Myung- Whun Chung, to name a few. He has performed and recorded the complete piano concertos by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Bartók, and all piano sonatas by Prokofiev. Hailed as an ‘unconventional virtuoso’, during his three-decade-long career he developed a diverse and worked with composers Witold Lutosławski and Arvo Pärt. Jablonski’s extensive discography includes several award-winning recordings.