Leif Ove Andsnes’ new Chopin album continues to attract international attention. Here are highlights of some of the most recent reviews.
La Liberté, Switzerland: “Magnetic Chopin: This is the value of great scores: they allow themselves to be reinterpreted, always new, always essential. The pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is sublime in his performance of the four Ballades.”
Stavanger Aftenblad, Norway: “Andsnes perfectly embodies the lyrical and narrative, which is a distinctive feature of the ballades … Andsnes opens a large room with his Chopin interpretations.”
RTBF, Belgium: “Leif Ove Andsnes immediately fell in love with Chopin’s Ballades and Nocturnes when he discovered them and his love for this work, full of emotions, is palpable in his recording.”
Bayerische Rundfunk, Germany. “A masterful miniature between nightmarish abysses and dream-sunken beauty … With this tension Leif Ove Andsnes takes us under his pianistic wing. The soul landscapes that we hear and look at are breathtaking!”
BBC Radio 3 “Record Review”, UK: “There are hidden depths here, riches to unveil and the piano sound matches the playing: it is intimate, up-close but with all the dynamic range Andsnes needs.”
France Culture, Radio France “A superb elegance, a touch which is absolutely beautiful … This is a really irresistible recording.”
Klassiskmusikk.com, Norway: “Here’s a recording that lets you hear well-known music as fresh as it was the first time, not least because of the unusual degree of restraint … In all four ballades, Andsnes seems unusually aware of the music as narrative: he seems to rejoice in the role of telling everything as he leans backwards and lowers the voice to suck the audience’s attention. Three nocturnes are interlaced between the ballads, and again the dimming is the most characteristic, as to emphasize the idea that these are after all night pieces.”
Classica Magazine, France: “Reason dominates this dark piano, the medium so singing, ignoring the pathos to better surprise the emotion …This is the quieter Chopin which Andsnes plays without makeup, forced phrasings or vanity, revealing a metric rigor that denounces rubato to better suspend time … The gesture is everything here because he renounces the spectacular, even in the rage of the codas that emphasize first the science of writing, the mastery of the keyboard, and illuminates the score and not the pianist. And if these ballades were nocturnes? Three great nocturnes arranged between them further widen this space, a moonless night appropriate to the penetrating poem that Andsnes distils in his sumptuously classical piano: his Chopin has no equivalent, like everything he touches.”