Chopin: Fantaisie (Kissin, Zimerman, Pollini, Rubinstein, Michelangeli et al)

The great thing about fantasies is that they’re works with huge interpretive space, since they’re less tightly bound by structure and are meant to sound at least a bit improvisational. So here’s eight remarkable (and very different) performances of one of Chopin’s greatest works, sometimes referred to as his 5th Ballade. (Performances listed below.) The F minor Fantasy is an extraordinarily powerful work, but it’s quite hard to figure out what exactly it’s trying to say. You’ve got extended elegiac passages, profuse melodicism, intense laments, three marches of drastically different character, flirtations with sonata / rondo / cyclic form, and one of Chopin’s most epiphanic creations in the B major chorale that emerges inexplicably in the middle of the piece to interrupt what might have been seen as a distorted sonata form. There is little about this piece that is not brilliant: consider, for instance, how the modulatory scheme of the main group of 5 themes (modulation in thir