Frédéric Chopin: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2, Benjamin Grosvenor, piano

Benjamin Grosvenor’s 2019 Decca recording of both Chopin piano concertos, with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Elim Chan, won the Gramophone Concerto Award in 2020 — a category Chopin’s concertos, among the most frequently recorded in the entire repertoire, still have to earn on the strength of a specific performance rather than the music’s own popularity.

About the concertos

Chopin composed both piano concertos as a very young man — No. 1 in E minor (published as his first, though actually composed after No. 2) and No. 2 in F minor — before he had turned 21, and before he left Poland for what would become his adopted home of Paris. Both are unusual among Romantic piano concertos for how much weight falls on the soloist relative to the orchestra: Chopin’s own writing for orchestra in these works has long divided opinion, with the piano writing itself remaining the clear centre of gravity throughout. Recording both concertos together, rather than pairing one with a different composer’s work, lets a listener hear Chopin’s own concerto-writing develop across the two pieces without an intervening change of idiom.

About the performers

Grosvenor’s career began unusually early and publicly — he won the keyboard final of the BBC Young Musician competition in 2004 at just 11 years old — and he has since built a substantial recording career with Decca spanning solo, concerto and chamber repertoire. Elim Chan, the conductor on this recording, became in 2014 the first woman to win the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition, a result that helped launch her international career; she went on to serve as the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor from 2018 to 2023, the capacity in which she leads the orchestra here.

Why the pairing works on disc

Concerto recordings live or die on the chemistry between soloist and conductor as much as on the soloist’s own technical command, and pairing a pianist still relatively early in his recording career with a conductor at a similarly significant stage of her own gives this disc a freshness that a more established, long-standing soloist-conductor partnership might not have brought to music this frequently recorded. The RSNO’s own familiarity with Chan by the time of this recording — well into her tenure as Principal Guest Conductor — meant the orchestra was already a known quantity to her rather than an unfamiliar ensemble assembled for a one-off studio date.

Why a fresh recording of these concertos can still win outright

Both Chopin concertos already have deep recorded discographies stretching back nearly a century, featuring some of the most celebrated pianists in the instrument’s history — which makes a Gramophone Award win for any new recording a genuinely competitive achievement rather than a formality. The panel’s judgment in awarding this particular pairing reflects less a claim that Grosvenor and Chan had somehow surpassed every prior recording than a recognition that a specific, fully realised interpretation, played and conducted with real conviction by artists still relatively early in their major recording careers, can still earn the top prize in a field this crowded — a reminder that critical recognition in classical recording rewards the quality of a specific performance far more than novelty of repertoire.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh for mmmusic to cover a real, current recording — it isn’t part of the site’s recovered 1991–2018 archive. It’s new coverage of what’s actually being recorded and recognised today, built from independently verified facts about the recording and its performers.