After The Dance: Chopin Complete Mazurkas [Double Album]

After the Dance is Spanish pianist Josu De Solaun’s recording of Chopin’s Complete Mazurkas — a Double Album with a nearly 60-piece cycle spanning Op. 6 through Op. 68, plus the posthumous and disputed works. Recorded over years of what De Solaun describes as living with, rather than studying, this music. In an unusually personal and literary set of liner notes, he pushes back against the long-standing view of the mazurkas as minor miniatures beside Chopin’s sonatas. Arguing instead that their greatness is “of another order” — the greatness of an inhabited room rather than a cathedral, a diary rather than a monument, each piece a dated fragment of an inner life unfolding in real time. De Solaun frames the recording’s title around absence and echo. The peasant dance these pieces sprang from had already begun to vanish by the time Chopin wrote them, so the music inhabits what remains after the dancing stops. Memory, breath, the warmth left in a room once someone has gone. Recorded on a Steinway D Piano at the Auditorio Manuel de Falla in Granada, and dedicated to Maria Floarea Pop, the album is both a major discographic undertaking from an ICMA-winning pianist (also known for his complete Enescu and Haydn recordings) and a deeply considered artistic statement on fidelity, repetition, and what it means to return, again and again, to the same music over a lifetime. Josu De Solaun, Piano