Chopin Mazurkas – Klara Min

Chopin’s mazurkas resist easy love. They are miniatures built on the bones of a peasant dance he heard as a boy in Żelazowa Wola and never quite let go of, even in the salons of Paris, even on his deathbed, where he reportedly asked for one to be played. The rhythm — that lean into the second beat, the little limp of the mazur, the swagger of the oberek — is not something you can fake with a metronome. You either feel it in the wrist or you don’t. Klara Min feels it.

I’ll admit skepticism going in. So many pianists treat these pieces as either salon trinkets or excuses for wistful rubato without direction, Chopin as perfume rather than dance. Min avoids both traps for the most part across her chosen seventeen, a personal anthology that happens to overlap heavily with the ones I’d have picked myself: the op. 24 set, the two from op. 30, the late and shadowed pair from op. 63. Any mazurka selection is really a self-portrait. Hers tells us she prizes clarity over haze.

The sound helps enormously. I say this having nearly dismissed the disc after a first pass through cheap earbuds and a mediocre stream, which did her no favors at all. Heard properly, on a real system, the piano tone glows without smearing, close-miked but not suffocating, every voicing audible without spotlighting. This matters more than usual here because Min’s whole interpretive method depends on you hearing inner details: the tenor line ghosting under a melody, the way a grace note lands a hair before or after the beat. Compress that, or muddy it, and the argument for her Chopin collapses.

Her rhythmic sense is exact without being metronomic, which sounds like a contradiction until you hear op. 63 no. 2, where the hesitations feel composed into the phrase rather than imposed on it. Nothing lurches. Nothing drags for effect. And yet this isn’t the plush, veiled poetry of Ivan Moravec, nor the spacious lyricism Garrick Ohlsson brought to his complete Hyperion cycle, recordings I still return to for their melodic generosity. Min charts a narrower, more classical course. Where Moravec, in op. 68 no. 2, dissolves the ornamental trills into an impressionist haze, deliberately blurred, pedal thick, like a memory rather than a statement, Min itemizes each trill note with almost fastidious clarity. You hear the difference immediately. Which you prefer will depend on what you want mazurkas to be: dreams, or dances.

op. 56 no. 2 is the disc’s small triumph. The main tune gets real tenderness, real vocal shaping, but the piece keeps its hips moving underneath. That’s the trick so many pianists miss: sentiment without loss of pulse. Compare this with Russell Sherman’s recent, wayward account of the same repertoire, where the search for originality tips over, again and again, into eccentricity: tempos that stall for no discernible reason, accents landing in strange places, whole phrases sounding almost improvised out of contrariness. Sherman is never boring. He is, however, often simply wrong. Min never risks that kind of wrongness, though the price of caution is that she also never quite achieves Sherman’s occasional flashes of the genuinely strange and revelatory.

Some listeners will find her too calculated, every rubato weighed and measured in advance, every silence timed. There’s truth in that. The very short pieces suffer most; op. 67 no. 3 sounds, on repeated hearings, a shade over-rehearsed, its charm slightly starched. Spontaneity here is simulated rather than caught in the act, and a listener attuned to that distinction may feel mild resistance, even while admiring the polish. But across seventeen mazurkas, that’s a minor complaint, not a disqualifying one.

The liner notes deserve mention. They’re unusually serious for a genre often treated as an afterthought: a note on every mazurka, thoughtful and specific rather than boilerplate. The artist biography, at two and a half pages, could have been cut by half. Nobody needs quite that much preamble before the music starts.

Still, this is a mazurka disc I’ll keep on the shelf, not tucked away. Min’s playing has intelligence, sound rhythmic instinct, and a tone worth savoring, even if it doesn’t unseat Moravec’s poetry or Ohlsson’s amplitude in my personal pantheon. I look forward to whatever she does next.