Jean-François Antonioli: |Ballades

By transferring the epic ballad onto the piano, Frédéric Chopin invented a new genre – and turned the virtuoso pianist into a narrator. BALLADES brings together the most prominent works of this genre on a single recording: the four large-scale ballades by Frédéric Chopin and Johannes Brahms, alongside the ballade by Gabriel Fauré, recorded at one of the world’s most beautiful concert halls, the Victoria Hall in Geneva. One should go beyond elegant parlance, and afford a view onto the grand drama: Swiss pianist and conductor Jean-Francois Antonioli is known for his obsession with detail which leaves nothing to chance. For Antonioli, this obsession is not an end in itself: he builds large-scale narratives from the most minute of nuances, and thereby presents even the most familiar work in a new light. His recordings have been awarded numerous prizes. Regarding his own encounter with the ballades by Chopin, Brahms, and Fauré, Jean-Francois Antonoli comments: ‘something that had already caught my attention in concerts became a certainty in the recording process: the connection between these different works is a feature that once used to be the golden rule for painters and architects – a maximum of unity, with the highest possible degree of diversity”.