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The 2-CD set celebrates both the 100th anniversary of his birth, as well as the 200th anniversary of Chopin's birth. With this release, Victoria Mushkatkol boldly challenges the commonplace interpretation of Frédéric Chopin's music: "There is an unfortunate tendency today to oversimplify Chopin's music and to accentuate the virtuosic at the expense of "zal" (a Polish word for an immense range of feelings that Chopin used to express a unique feeling that pervades all of his music," writes Mushkatkol. "With these recordings, I hope to counter these misguided notions and to reveal the intricate polyphony of voices, the melodicism, and uncompromising spirit embedded in Chopin's music and to demonstrate the sheer abundance of ideas and emotions in these works.' Since making her debut at age ten as soloist with the Kiev Philharmonic, Victoria Mushkatkol has been welcomed on stages world-wide as soloist, recitalist and chamber musician. Widely respected as a pedagogue, Mushkatkol has taught at the Interlochen Arts Academy, Oberlin Conservatory, and had her students receive prizes at such renowned competitions as the Cleveland International Competition and Concert Artist Guild International Competition. Subterranean Connections: Bach and Chopin On the face of it, the works of Bach and Chopin recorded here are radically different in conception and sound. They were written, straddling the Classical era, roughly two hundred years apart and were even originally intended for different instruments. In addition, the cultural, social, economic, and aesthetic contexts of the Baroque and Romantic periods diverge to such a significant extent that we can say that Bach and Chopin created within virtually different worlds. Baroque music, with it's complex tonal counterpoint expressing fundamental order and balance, and Romantic music, with it's expansion of tonality and emphasis on personal expression and the realm of the emotions, set very different technical and expressive challenges for the modern pianist. Bach's body of work expansively encompasses music for a wide range of forces and contexts with the church as his prime patron, whereas Chopin, who was supported by a secular and aristocratic patronage system, composed music almost exclusively for the piano and the salon. And yet, irrespective of these underlying differences, subterranean connections intricately link these two composers and their solo keyboard works. Both Bach and Chopin were absolutely creative and innovative forces who have handed down some of the pinnacles of Western art music and have re-shaped the history of keyboard music. They each created and refined their own unmistakable sound worlds through the imaginative re-invention of established forms and genres, particularly dance forms as heard here in Bach's French Overture and Chopin's Mazurkas. Both were composer-performers for whom music-making and composition were inextricably connected to the point of being inseparable. In other words, they composed works as vehicles for their activities as performers, and their daily music-making led directly to their compositional activities. Their exploration of compositional possibilities was intimately connected to the physical immediacy of the instrument. Johann Sebastian Bach's French Overture in B minor, BWV 831 was composed in 1733-1734 and published in 1735 as the second part, along with the contrasting Italian Concerto, of his Keyboard Practice (Clavier Übung) series. At the center of his weekly activities throughout the 1730s, the Collegium Musicum offered Bach the opportunity, not only to foster his cultivation of religious music for the church, but to compose and perform works for the harpsichord and organ. The publishing venture of the four part Clavier Übung series-published in installments between 1731 and 1741-was certainly an opportunity to bring in extra income, however Bach's intentions were not simply financial. Bach envisioned the project as a systematic surv
