Chopin: Four Scherzi (Grosvenor)

Grosvenor has a wonderful and thoroughly unique way with Chopin’s Scherzos. He knows you can’t make these Scherzos funny qua funny, so he plays instead with a lightness (and often, speed) that borders on insouciance. The result is something that sounds (a) like it has been improvised, and (b) utterly impossible to improvise—an interpretation that has to be heard as a series of perfectly mapped oratorical gestures rather than a string of notes or big thematic chunks of music pressed dramatically together: just listen to the convulsive, spasm-like entrance of the first theme of the Op.20, the hyper-expressive burble of the Op.31 and the coruscating sweep of its runs, the terse, black, slightly impish fierceness of the Op.39 [23:13] punctuated by an ever-expanding chorale and gossamer-thin textures [19:42], and the crisp coyness of the Op.54’s outer sections set against the beguiling lyricism in the middle. It's very rare to find a recording that, by increasing tempo, draws out detail rather than obscures it (those accents in the final run of the Op.20, for instance, the melodic shape of the Op.39 chorale, the whirligig structure of the Op.54 theme): this recording of definitely one of them.

00:00 – No.1, Op.20 in B Minor
08:12 – No.2, Op.31 in Bb Minor
17:21 – No.3, Op.39 in C# Minor
23:57 – No.4, Op.54 in E Major