Bach & Chopin

Dina Ugorskaja writes: "J. S. Bach's Inventions - unfortunately still regarded as mere exercises - have fascinated me since my childhood thanks to their incredibly refined wealth of ideas, particularly when it comes to just two voices, where it is up to the player to discover how able you really have to be in order to master the task. And standing in contrast to this is one of the most challenging cycles in piano music, in both a musical and a technical sense - Chopin's Préludes, with their rapid changes between different, and at times highly polarized, feelings and sentiments; a synthesis imbibed with disarming naturalness that makes it almost impossible for a performance to bring out the music itself and not the interpreter. The tension between the deceptive straightforwardness of Bach and the simplicity required by the complexity of Chopin, for me, makes this an exciting combination."