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Hough, also a composer, is a lively writer who maintains a newsy blog. Listen to some of the best new recordings here.
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Classical Music: 2021 was a year of reawakening for the art form.Jazz Albums: Even the big-statement albums this year had a feeling of intense closeness.Pop Albums: Recordings with big feelings and room for catharsis made the most powerful connections.Best Songs: A posthumous political statement and a superstar’s 10-minute redo are among the 66 best tracks of 2021.Ax also played: the 1903 suite “Estampes” (“Prints”) and the seductive, dancing and unabashedly carnal “L’Isle Joyeuse” (“The Joyous Island”), completed in 1904.įrom Lil Nas X to Mozart to Esperanza Spalding here is what we loved listening to this year. Hough gave technically superb and rhapsodic accounts of the four Chopin ballades, placing them in the center of a program that began and ended with Debussy, including two works that, as it happened, Mr. Ax, playing with his customary elegance and wonderful impetuosity, presented Chopin within the heritage of French music, offering works by Bizet, Rameau and Debussy in the first half, and then taking on the four dazzling Chopin scherzos. That their programs were conceptually so similar was most likely a coincidence. Recently, two major pianists, Emanuel Ax and Stephen Hough, explored the French side of Chopin. He fit comfortably into the world of Parisian salons. Seeking a musically richer environment, Chopin left Warsaw at 20, eventually settled in Paris and never set foot in Poland again. Yet his father was French, a translator and educator who moved to Poland, married a Polish woman and raised a family there.
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Chopin had a lifelong cultural and emotional connection to his homeland. To Sand and her circle it must have seemed so. The novelist George Sand, who had a volatile 10-year relationship with Chopin, used to quip to mutual friends in Paris that Chopin was more Polish than Poland.