Frédéric Chopin

Premiered at the farewell concert he gave just before leaving Warsaw, its slow movement holds the lyricism of his last days at home.

• The second movement, a Romance (Larghetto), is what he described in a letter as a calm, melancholy reverie, as if sinking beneath moonlight on a beautiful spring night.
• The way the orchestra stays in an accompanying role while the piano carries the melody as if singing became the model for all his later concerto writing.
• The third-movement rondo is steeped in the rhythm of the krakowiak, a Polish folk dance, and sounds like a final farewell before leaving his homeland.
• The opening orchestral introduction runs unusually long, a passage often joked about among pianists as 'just how nervously must one wait'.

Because its completion coincided with the anguish he felt on hearing of the fall of Warsaw while traveling from Vienna to Paris, it has long gone by the nickname 'Revolutionary'.

• The technique in which the left hand spreads chords out one note at a time as it races ceaselessly up and down (arpeggio) seems to transcribe rage and despair directly.
• The right hand's fierce chordal blows sound like fists pounding on a collapsing city wall.
• The title 'Revolutionary' was not given by Chopin himself but is a nickname attached later; yet because the lines of despair he wrote in his diary coincide with the time of its completion, it is still called that today.
• Its demanding left-hand technique makes it one of the classic finger-twisters among pianists.

Works from the years when he was captivating the Parisian salons, deeply steeped in the bel canto melodies of his close friend Bellini.

• The main melody of No. 2 in E-flat major is a bel canto phrase that flows like an opera singer drawing out a long breath, and Bellini's influence is unmistakable.
• Each time the melody returns its ornaments are varied differently, a passage where interpretations differ widely from pianist to pianist.
• Especially striking is how, above the left hand's gentle arpeggios that spread the chords in a flowing line, the right-hand melody rides a rubato that strays from the beat and freely stretches and quickens the pace.
• A piece once played in salons under soft lighting, it comes closest to its original atmosphere when heard at a soft, whispering dynamic rather than ringing out loudly.

It is said to have been inspired by an epic poem of the Polish poet Mickiewicz, written in his early Paris years, when longing for his homeland mingled with memories of the uprising.

• The unhurried melody of the opening sounds like a storyteller clearing his throat to recall days long past.
• The way the once-quiet melody gathers force in the latter half and hurtles toward a stormy final coda is famous for demanding both stamina and emotional control from the performer.
• In the passages where the two hands cross each other with different senses of the beat, every pianist places the emphasis differently.
• Knowing that the very attempt to tell a narrative poem on a single piano was a new form in its day makes the work's narrative arc all the clearer.

A cycle completed on his Majorcan sickbed; between its brief pieces the unsettled mood of that winter shows through undisguised.

• No. 15 in D-flat major, the 'Raindrop', owes its nickname to a left-hand figure that repeats the same low note like falling rain, and it has come down to us bound up with that stormy night on Majorca.
• Its design — pieces lasting anywhere from under a minute to several minutes, making a full circuit of all twenty-four keys — is regarded as a bold architecture.
• The repeated chord progression of No. 4 in E minor was played at his own funeral, and the piece is spoken of as holding a premonition from those sickly years.
• Heard one after another, the short pieces reveal abrupt swings of feeling, like a record of that winter when his health and spirits rose and fell many times a day.

Completed during his most prolific years at Nohant, it pours pride in his homeland into the stately rhythm of a Polish aristocratic dance.

• The rising figure that climbs the stairs in half steps at the opening sounds like a fanfare preparing for the heroic theme that bursts out after it.
• The pounding left-hand octaves of the middle section are widely heard as an imitation of galloping hooves, and they are a notorious test of the performer's wrist endurance.
• The stately theme returns again and again in changing keys, giving the impression of a vow repeated over and over.
• Listening for a slight lean on the second beat of the triple meter brings you closer to this dance's original gait.

An unfinished posthumous work he kept close until just before his death, it is like a last farewell set to the dance rhythm of his homeland.

• Left as a sketch, its tonality and harmony waver unsteadily, and many hear this as the turmoil of a mind facing death.
• A faint trace survives of the gait peculiar to the Polish folk mazurka, with its slight accent on the third beat, showing that he held on to the rhythm of home to the very end.
• Heard beside his finished mazurkas, its melody seems to break off in fragments — a trace of the unfinished manuscript itself.
• Performers differ on where the piece should end, so the final bars vary slightly from edition to edition.