🎹 A Moment of Romantic Grandeur: Alex Brachet’s Live Chopin from Marseille

In an age where many studio recordings chase technical perfection, it’s always refreshing—sometimes revelatory—to hear a pianist embrace the raw beauty and fleeting imperfections of live performance. Such is the case with French pianist Alex Brachet’s new release: a concert recording of Chopin’s Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante, Op. 22, captured live at Marseille’s Théâtre La Criée.

This is not a pristine, studio-polished take—and it doesn't pretend to be. A few faint coughs and rustling programs remind us that we’re in the room with Brachet, seated under stage lights, facing a living, breathing audience. But rather than distract, these ambient traces ground the performance in something deeply human.

The Andante Spianato opens with remarkable poise and lyricism. Brachet allows Chopin’s rippling left-hand figurations to float almost weightlessly beneath the song-like right-hand melody. There’s a quiet restraint in his pacing—an invitation to lean in, rather than be dazzled outright. His tone is warm, glowing, never rushed.

Then comes the Grande Polonaise Brillante, and Brachet doesn’t hold back. The polonaise, a genre that often teeters between noble elegance and flamboyant display, is here rendered with both. His octaves and passagework are clean, but never mechanical. More impressively, he captures the work’s shifting character—from courtly gestures to playful outbursts to stormy rhetoric—with a keen sense of inner structure.

This is a Chopin interpreter who has clearly thought deeply about narrative. He’s not simply playing the notes; he’s shaping an arc, a journey, without losing spontaneity. Some listeners may be reminded of Rubinstein’s poetic directness, or even Zimerman’s structural command, though Brachet retains a voice of his own—less polished, more immediate, and in some ways, more intimate.

This release joins a growing list of notable recordings by Brachet, including a searing rendition of Scriabin’s Étude Op. 8 No. 12, a thunderous Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Liszt, and a brooding Étude-Tableau Op. 39 No. 5 by Rachmaninoff. His Bach—particularly the Partita No. 2 in C minor—reveals a strong architectural sense and rhythmic clarity.

If there’s one takeaway from this Chopin recording, it’s that Brachet values sincerity over perfection. And in today’s algorithm-driven listening landscape, that alone feels like an artistic statement.

🎧 Listen on your platform of choice:

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