Chopin: Ballades and Piano Sonata No. 2

Chopin’s Second Sonata and four ballades are among his greatest works. Heroic and original, they sorely tested the composer’s contemporaries. Musical pioneers have always received short shrift, and Chopin’s breaks with convention meant that the fiery intricacy of the Fourth Ballade’s coda and, most of all, the chilling enigma of the Second Sonata’s finale provoked puzzlement and hostility, even in composers of Schumann’s and Mendelssohn’s stature. For Mendelssohn such music went too far, while Schumann asked, When is a sonata a sonata?

If any pianist is equipped to eschew obscurity for lucidity it is Emanuel Ax: like his mentor, Arthur Rubinstein, he dismisses all notions of neurosis. For Ax, as for Rubinstein, Chopin’s was a noble rather than a morbid soul. A richly comprehensive pianist, Ax has a grandeur, ease and naturalness that make him a consummate musical truth-teller: one whose playing – uninflated, unglitzy – is of an aristocratic essence.