Ballades - Piano

The concept of a ballade isn't known to have existed any earlier in instrumental music than when one was first composed by Chopin. Widely defined phrases, accelerated and slowed musical narrative, cumulative climaxes, and codas filled with pathos - these qualities give Chopin's ballades a special, epic tone.

The National Edition is a complete source-based edition - it takes into account all the available sources of Chopin's text: autgraphs, hand-written copies corrected by the composer, first editions and also "teaching copies" used by Chopin for his pedagogical work, in which we may find his original fingering. Secondly, the National Edition is a critical edition, which means that the authencity of sources has been veified and their relation to one another examined. The editors of National Edition, Professor Jan Ekier and Pawel Kaminski, put a special emphasis on the analysis of numerous existing sources instead of reproducing the notation of a given work on the basis of a single source, or just a couple of them. Therefore, each volume of the National Edition is published with an extensive and comprehensive Source Commentary explaining the editorial intentions an the manner of interpretation of particular scores.