Edition with previously unreleased recordings from 1960 

"This boy plays better than any one of us", the chairman of the jury of the 1960 Chopin Competition, the probably most prestigious piano competition judged at all. Artur Rubinstein was that; In the jury sat a few other luminaries of this league (Nadja Boulanger about). The "boy", an 18-year-old Italian named Maurizio Pollini, won the first prize with flying flags (as the youngest participant!),

 Then recorded the first Chopin piano concerto for the EMI (a legendary recording And then became afraid of their own greatness. The "Préludes", whose recording producer Peter Andrys described as a "goose bumps" experience, did not release the young artist; Only eight years later did his next record appear. At EMI, Pollini was dismissed from the contract after ten frustrating years, in order to be able to see how the former immediately rose to the world star at Deutsche Grammophon. There, too, he played the "Préludes" again, a recording with reference status.

 In terms of musical design and pianist brilliance, no doubt rightly. But how much more spontaneous and easier does this finally y released first recording!  The slimmer piano sound has, of course, to do with it, but above all, one feels as if every distance between work and interpreter disappears. One can only speculate on what led the young pianist to withdraw the recording. What the listener now reveals after more than half a century is a combination of the highest musicality and stupid virtuoso, the repertory value of which is extremely rare in this form not be overestimated.