People have been singing ballads since the beginning of human history, and poets have been writing them for almost that long. But it took Frederic Chopin to turn the ballad (or ballade, as he called ...

Following on from his Chopin Preludes disc comes Li Yundi’s first recording of what are arguably the composer’s biggest challenges: the four Ballades. They are coolly but compellingly dispatched, with ...

Amateur pianist (and Guardian editor) Alan Rusbridger gave up the instrument as a teenager, but took it up again decades later – and vowed to learn how to play Chopin's first Ballade, one of the most ...

Su performed Ballade No. 3, one of Chopin's more intricate and beloved pieces for solo piano, in the CPR Performance Studio recently. The Aurora Sentinel's recent profile of Su offers an interesting ...

How to make the Chopin Ballades sound fresh? For the veteran British pianist Stephen Hough, who essayed the complete set in the second half of his Friday recital in Rockport, the answer lies in ...

A balladeer is someone who tells a story in song, so you’d expect something called a ’ballade’ to be something like a story in notes. But Chopin left no clue about what stories had in mind - so ...

As a pianist, Frederic Chopin possessed talents beyond emulation. He had an impact on other musicians entirely out of proportion to the number of concerts he gave — only 30 public performances in 30 ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. How did Chopin play the piano? A veil of mystery will always stand between us and composers who lived before ...