From the seventeenth century onwards, chamber music was one of the main strands of musical output in Europe. Chopin, however, wrote chamber works sporadically and apparently on the margins of his oeuvre.

And yet, if we take a closer look at the works on this disc, we can discern a certain fondness for the cultivation of this kind of music. The chamber music of Romantic composers was founded and developed, like symphonic music, on the rich experiments and brilliant achievements of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, unsurpassed in their creations in chamber genres.

In the nineteenth century, the cultivation of chamber music post-Beethoven entailed a certain way of creative composition. Whilst taking account of the individual differences in the styles of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak, one may also reference the style of the Romantic quartet, trio, quintet and chamber sonata. And so Chopin, too, by playing his part in chamber genres, also joined this European community.

Pianist Szymon Nehring was the winner of the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv (2017) and a laureate of the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw (2015), where he received a distinction, the audience prize and numerous additional prizes. In 2015 he was awarded a Krystian Zimerman scholarship.

He is joined by cellist Marcin Zdunik, whose repertoire ranges from the Renaissance to new music, he also improvises, arranges and composes. A regular guest of ‘Chopin and his Europe’, he has also participated in such prestigious festivals as the BBC Proms and Progetto Martha Argerich in Lugano.

Also on this recording is viola player Ryszard Groblewski, winner of the 60th Geneva Competition and a graduate of Piotr Reichert’s class at the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw.