Louis Lortie

Louis Lortie – Louis Lortie Plays Chopin, Vol. 7 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:59 minutes | 1,05 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos

For the seventh volume of his Chopin project, the Canadian pianist and exclusive Chandos Artist Louis Lortie has built a programme that includes works from the earliest to the latest period in the composer’s life, all of which are linked by their evocation of ‘nationality’ – Italy, Spain, and of course Chopin’s beloved Poland.
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Louis Lortie – Louis Lortie Plays Chopin, Vol. 5 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:01 minutes | 1014 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos

Louis Lortie’s Chopin series is achieving landmark status, as confirmed by the increasingly enthusiastic reviews of progressive volumes. This fifth one sumptuously highlights the Polish influences in Chopin’s music, offering gems from among the mazurkas and polonaises. Relatively brief in duration and simple in structure, the mazurkas reveal other aspect of Chopin’s music: quirky melodies, strangely chromatic harmonies, oddly accented rhythms, irregular phrase lengths, and wildly contrasting keyboard textures. They represent a fascinating part of Chopin’s output, for audiences and pianists alike. The vigour of the polonaises featured here, including the first two to be published, confirms Chopin as a radical, yet idiomatic transformer of the genre. The Allegro de concert, which Chopin was said to have kept for his projected return to ‘a free Warsaw’, is another link to his beloved country.
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Louis Lortie – Louis Lortie Plays Chopin, Vol. 5 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:01 minutes | 1014 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos

Louis Lortie’s Chopin series is achieving landmark status, as confirmed by the increasingly enthusiastic reviews of progressive volumes. This fifth one sumptuously highlights the Polish influences in Chopin’s music, offering gems from among the mazurkas and polonaises. Relatively brief in duration and simple in structure, the mazurkas reveal other aspect of Chopin’s music: quirky melodies, strangely chromatic harmonies, oddly accented rhythms, irregular phrase lengths, and wildly contrasting keyboard textures. They represent a fascinating part of Chopin’s output, for audiences and pianists alike. The vigour of the polonaises featured here, including the first two to be published, confirms Chopin as a radical, yet idiomatic transformer of the genre. The Allegro de concert, which Chopin was said to have kept for his projected return to ‘a free Warsaw’, is another link to his beloved country.
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Louis Lortie – Liszt: The Complete Années de Pèlerinage (2011)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:41:11 minutes | 2,42 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos

There’s been no dearth of Années de pèlerinage recordings over the past year or so. Predictably, they range from the compelling (Libor Novacek, Années I and II, Landor 290 and 278; André Laplante, Années I, Analekta 29980), to the less good (Michael Korstick, Années I and II, cpo 777478 and 777585), to the deeply disappointing (Jerome Lowenthal, Années complete, Bridge 9307). The new, complete Années de pèlerinage of Louis Lortie, however, is in a class all its own. He approaches this summit of romanticism steeped in the music of Liszt (his recording of all the works for piano and orchestra, Chandos 10371, a collaboration during 1999–2000 with George Pehlivanian and the Residentie Orchestra of The Hague, is one of the finest). Lortie is a richly imaginative musician and a pianist of cultured refinement whose interpretations invariably tend toward understatement. These 26 pieces occupied Liszt for some 46 years and, along with the Sonata, are emblematic of his achievement as a piano composer. You get the sense that Lortie has long lived with the entire cycle, coming to know (and love) each of its components equally well. Add to this his unstinting identification with Liszt’s poetic message, and you have all the elements required for an Années de pèlerinage of tremendous freshness and originality.

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Louis Lortie – Louis Lortie Plays Chopin, Vol. 4 (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:23:20 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos

This is the fourth volume of Louis Lortie’s highly-successful series devoted to Chopin. The recording perfectly illustrates how Chopin elevated the waltz to a genre of musical art, from danses de salon evocative of a genial milieu to ‘works’ with proper opus numbers. Growing up in the 1820s, the composer at first viewed the waltz purely pragmatically, as a means to a social end in the dance salon. But after spending time in Vienna and Paris in the 1830s he decided that a waltz might be worthy of the deeper appreciation accorded a ‘work’.

From moods of liveliness, in introductory calls to the dance, to more poetical or sentimental sections, the affective achievement in these works is great, whether the mood captured is plaintive (the B minor, A flat major, or F minor ones), evocative of the dance salon (the E major), lilting (the D flat major), reminiscent of a Ländler (the A flat major, the only waltz Chopin composed in 3 / 8 meter), dramatic (the E minor), or brilliant (the G flat major).

The nocturnes also trace their origins to the salon. The genre derives from a type of vocal music, akin to the solo romance, but highly popular among amateurs as an opportunity for singing duets.

With this series, Louis Lortie has made his reputation as a ‘model Chopinist’ (BBC Music).

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Louis Lortie – Louis Lortie plays Chopin Volume 3 (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:36 minutes | 1,07 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos

Louis Lortie here gives us the third volume in his ongoing Chopin project. Throughout the series his guiding principle has been to emulate the recital practice of the great romantic pianists, who might play a short improvisation before a major work in order to set the audience in the right frame of mind. On this disc Lortie plays the four Impromptus and the Piano Sonata in B minor, introducing each with a Chopin Nocturne (typically of an improvisatory character) in the same or a related key.

Of all the Impromptus, the first and most famous was actually withdrawn from the public during Chopin’s lifetime. Published posthumously as Fantaisie- Impromptu, it set the mould for the unpretentious pieces that followed, all striving more toward casual entertainment than high artistic expression. The third and last of Chopin’s Piano Sonatas, Op. 58 in B minor was composed in 1845. While its four-movement design reflects a traditional approach, the appearance of imitative counterpoint, chromatic harmonies, and heightened rhythmic tension mark it as an inspired masterwork of Chopin’s late creative period.

Lortie’s previous two volumes have received extremely high praise, the magazine Pianist claiming of Vol. 2 that ‘his selected nocturnes are probably not bettered by any living pianist’.

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Louis Lortie – Louis Lortie plays Chopin Volume 2 (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:15 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos

Recording exclusively for Chandos, Lortie is recognised as one of the finest interpreters of Chopin today. He first recorded Chopin’s Etudes for Chandos more than twenty years ago; the disc was named as one of the ’50 great performances by superlative pianists’ by BBC Music. Volume 1 of his current Chopin series also has received excellent reviews: the magazine Pianist wrote: ‘He is a pianist of our time when it comes to speed, energy and an unfussy approach to Chopin. His way of playing is like a sharply cut steel sculpture, super elegant and with not one single smudge.’ And in the words of International Piano: ‘These are full-blooded and eloquent performances, an auspicious start to what looks likely to become one of the finest of Chopin surveys.’

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Louis Lortie – Louis Lortie plays Chopin Volume 1 (2010)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:19:28 minutes | 1,27 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos

In the era of the great romantic pianists, it used to be the fashion at piano recitals to offer an improvisation in the same key as that of the piece that was scheduled to follow, in order to get the audience ‘in the mood’. To compensate for this lost art, I have thought of always playing one of the nocturnes before a major piano composition by Chopin. It makes these nocturnes appear more like an improvisation, to serve as counterweight to the very dense content of the Ballades, Scherzos, and Sonatas. This practice transfers smoothly the logic of a piano recital to a CD and makes more sense by allowing the listener to enjoy the contents in one stretch’ writes Louis Lortie on his concept for the album.

The immensely respected French-Canadian virtuoso Louis Lortie celebrates the Chopin anniversary with an album of Nocturnes and Scherzos for solo piano. These works stretch the pianist’s technique in every possible way. This Canadian pianist has long had an association with Chandos, and is recognised as one of the finest interpreters of Chopin. He first recorded Chopin’s Études for Chandos more than 20 years ago; it was named as one of the ‘50 great performances by superlative pianists’ by BBC Music Magazine. Since then he’s enjoyed an exceptionally rich performing and recording career. He won First Prize in the Busoni Competition in 1984. He was also a prize-winner at the Leeds Competition. He’s been named an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a Knight of the National Order of Quebec.

A recent performance at Carnegie Hall elicited the following review, ‘Those who bought a ticket to hear Louis Lortie play on Saturday night must have been extremely glad they did so. The pianist from Montreal gave a recital at Carnegie Hall that was filled with beauty, brains, and virtuosity.’

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Louis Lortie – Saint-Saëns : Piano Concertos Nos. 1, 2 & 4 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:58 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos

Having already mastered such French concertos as Poulenc’s on record, the French-Canadian pianist Louis Lortie and Edward Gardner now explore with the BBC Philharmonic the vigorous and progressive world of Camille Saint-Saëns, offering the first of two volumes to contain his complete piano concertos.

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Louis Lortie – In paradisum: A Fauré Recital, Vol. 2 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:54 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos

The Canadian pianist Louis Lortie returns with the second volume of his overview of the solo piano works of Gabriel Fauré. The two major works in this recital are the Ballade, Op. 19 and the Thème et variations, Op. 73. The earlier Ballade shows Fauré’s debt to Liszt, whilst the Thème et variations was modelled on Schumann’s Études symphoniques. The rest of the programme consists of shorter Nocturnes and Barcarolles, and is book-ended by the Pie Jesu and In paradisum from the Requiem – Fauré’s bestknown work – in transcriptions by Louis Lortie himself.

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Louis Lortie – Chopin: Piano Works, Vol. 6 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:23:35 minutes | 1,24 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos

For the sixth volume of his Chopin project, the Canadian pianist and exclusive Chandos Artist Louis Lortie has built a programme that includes works from the earliest to the latest periods in the composer’s life, all of which have connection with or focus on Chopin’s Polish identity.

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Louis Lortie – Liszt: The Complete Années de Pèlerinage (2011/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:40:59 minutes | 2,40 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos

French-Canadian powerhouse Louis Lortie performs Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage in this tour de force of challenging music by a notoriously challenging composer. The Première Année is announced with majestic chords and trills, and one can sense that Lortie uses the whole piano and his whole body energy in the music. Representing a journey to Switzerland, this piece features a fuller, heavier sound on the piano that is especially evident in the eighth movement. The second movement swirls in the lower register, complemented by delicate upper passages. The fifth movement is particularly fantastic: Lortie creates fantastic drama between the upper and lower registers, absolutely giving the music his all. The piece ends quietly yet grandly, with a beautiful cantabile feel as the composer requested. This piece is not the most exciting of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage, for the music tends to sound alike and run together after a while; Lortie tries to make the most of it, however, but the composition has its limitations. The Deuxième Année is a far superior work, drawing on Italian themes and authors and making use of more sophisticated and complex lines. This makes for more drama in the music, which one hears in the dark beginning of the conclusion (which is inspired by Dante), after which the music travels through many moods with a repeating motif. Here are some of Liszt’s hallmarks, such as his passion and yearning. The Troisième Année is the most engaging work of the CD. In Lortie’s interpretation, the first movement, a prayer, pleads so delicately. Yet the pianist can also play very brightly even in darkness, as in the third movement, or with lively sparkling as in the fourth movement, where he creates beautiful swells in the music. The final piece of the album, a supplement to the Deuxième Année called Venezia e Napoli is very brief, but it is still a showcase for Lortie’s gifts. He tackles the runs in the first movement with incredible agility and perfection, with not a single flaw. One can only wonder how anyone could play the final movement, with its complex, challenging, and difficult tempi. The answer is simple: if an artist is as brilliant as Lortie, he/she can handle the most difficult of repertoire.
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