About

The music of Frédéric Chopin has been recorded hundreds of times before. But never like this. The Chopin Project brings together award-winning young Icelandic pop/classical musician Ólafur Arnalds and the acclaimed German-Japanese pianist Alice Sara Ott for an exciting new take on Chopin’s music. Arnalds chose a programme of Chopin works to create an emotional arc through the disc, and then composed linking sections for string quintet, piano and synthesizer based on the atmosphere and motifs of those pieces. Pianist Alice Sara Ott is well known as a child prodigy and has parlayed that fame into an adult career that has included critical acclaim and a contract with the Deutsche Grammophon label that resulted in an innovative collaboration with electronic musician Arnalds.

In one case, "Eyes Shut/Nocturne in C minor" (Track 6), these two are combined. Arnalds' pieces employ his own electronic keyboard textures, plus a live string quintet. On top of this, the pianos are vintage instruments hunted down in Reykjavik, and the ambience was manipulated by recording in various venues and with various microphones there. Arnalds adds ambient soundscapes (noise, sounds of conversation, whispers, etc.) to the music. The string quintet, for example, was a sound unused by Chopin, and it introduces an element that seems discordant with the source material. But there is a major X factor working in favor of this release: nobody has ever tried anything much like this, either with Chopin or with any other composer, and it just might be the beginning of something new and important. — via AllMusic

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Label: Mercury KX
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Black/White Marble
Reissued: 2024 / Original Release: 2015
Genre: Classical
Style: Contemporary, Neo-Classical

File under: Ambient / Modern Classical
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