Title: Grimaud plays Chopin: Chopin loses
Product review: This is my first encounter with Grimaud's playing and I can't say I enjoyed it much. Grimaud pounds the first two movements of the Chopin sonata into submission, rarely stopping to pause for breath or reaching anything below a forte. As for her "gorgeous tone" (as Dan Davis puts it), her sound gives a rich new meaning to "chalky." Her attempts at lyrical playing in the Trio of the Funeral March and the Berceuse are remarkably metronomic, and her trills in the latter are distictly unmagical. I suppose some will regard such playing as "powerful," but to me its mostly noisy. The Barcarolle is somewhat better, though no competition for the likes of Moravec and Lipatti. The Rachmaninov sonata, a remarkable piece of junk, fares better in Grimaud's heavy hands, but I doubt if I'll be listening to this cd in the future.
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