On February 26, 2010, a historic concert took place in Warsaw, the birthplace of Frederic Chopin. During the course of that single evening, all the works written by this composer for piano with orchestra were performed, with participants of the highest calibre. Furthermore, the event took place under the auspices of the Frederic Chopin Institute, with the knowledge and experience of engineers from Polish Radio and with the creativity of the film-maker Phil Grabsky, whose cameras were placed amongst the musicians of the orchestra.

All this enabled the full magic of a historic event to be captured in both image and sound. Playing an Érard piano dating from 1849, the pianists Nelson Goerner, Kevin Kenner and Janusz Olejniczak, alongside the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century and Frans Brüggen, each performed each of the six works which the young Chopin composed in order for them to be displayed before the demanding public of his own country. With such works, Chopin’s fame as a great piano virtuoso was to become established elsewhere.

Performances of the two famous Concertos, in E minor and F minor, are joined here by the less-famous but notwithstanding highly-attractive works, such as the Variations on ‘Là ci darem la mano’, from Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’, or the ‘Fantasy on Polish Airs’.

Completing the film of this event is a series of interviews with the soloists, and with Marc Destrubé, the orchestra’s leader.