SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce the second volume of Romantic Revolution, a revelatory exploration by pianist Michael Dussek of the musical relationship between his ancestor, Jan Ladislav Dussek, and Fryderyk Chopin.
Volume II focuses on music composed during the period 1789 to 1846 spanning the early years of Dussek’s compositional career and the final years of Chopin’s. Dussek’s early Sonata in G minor (Op.10 No.2) from 1789 already shows the Bohemian composer pushing against inherited norms and reaching towards the testing of form and extreme keyboard ranges that would color his music over the next 20 years, combining, as Dussek says in his insightful booklet notes, “virtuosic fingerwork [that] alternates with operatic dialogue”. His Op.70 Sonata in A flat, Le retour à Paris, from 1805 “in every way breaks new ground” to produce “a thrilling tour de force setting new standards in virtuosic piano writing”. The two companion Chopin pieces – the Fantasy in F minor (Op.49) and Polonaise-Fantaisie in A flat (Op.61) – have been chosen “to emphasize the similarities of piano sonority and harmony” between the two composers. Their inclusion points to Dussek’s guiding aim of the series: “simply to demonstrate the influence, in my view undeniable and at least partially unrecognized, of [Jan Ladislav] Dussek on the great Polish composer [Chopin]”.
