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Turkish pianist Idil Biret is a fixture of the Naxos catalog and its completist enterprises, having recorded the collected piano works of Chopin and Brahms for the label. Between 1994 and 2008, she recorded a cycle of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas for her own IBA (Idil Biret Archives) label. She has appeared with most of the world's major orchestras and presented recitals in many countries, with a notable high point being a complete performance of Liszt's brutally difficult transcriptions of Beethoven's nine symphonies at the 1986 Montpellier Festival in France. Studio performances of those transcriptions were recorded for EMI and released on the IBA label. Biret was, in short, one of the world's top-rank pianists, not a star whose name was familiar even to casual listeners, but a versatile performer whose capabilities were well known to enthusiasts.

Born November 21, 1941, in Ankara, Turkey, Biret was a classic child prodigy. Turks called her the Turkish Mozart, and when she was eight the financially strapped Turkish Parliament voted a special appropriation to make possible her musical education in Europe. Hypersensitive to music as a baby, she gained the ability to hear a tune and reproduce it on the piano when she was only two. She had an uncanny ability to learn music in her mind without practicing it at the keyboard, delivering it perfectly formed to the amazement of onlookers. Biret's first teacher in France was the famed pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, under whose tutelage she blazed through the curriculum at the Paris Conservatory. She took three first prizes there at 15 and began her professional career the following year. Biret later studied with German pianist Wilhelm Kempff, who called her his favorite disciple.

One major event of her early career was a series of concerts she gave in Moscow in 1960, organized by Russian pianist Emil Gilels. She would go on to play over 100 concerts in Russia. In 1963 Biret made her U.S. debut with the Boston Symphony in Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 3, a trademark work in her repertoire. However, in addition to her Chopin and Brahms cycles, Biret was known for performing and recording contemporary music. She recorded extremely adventurous music for composer Ilhan Mimaroglu's label Finnadar in the 1970s, and her 1995 Naxos disc of Pierre Boulez's three sonatas won France's Golden Diapason award.

Frédéric Chopin was the most famous composer of Polish origin in the history of Western concert music. He was a progressive who revolutionized the harmonic content, the texture, and the emotional quality of the small piano piece, turning light dance forms, nocturnes, and study genres into profound works that were both daring and deeply inward.

Born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin to a French father and a Polish mother, probably on March 1, 1810, he was a native of Zelazowa Wola village west of Warsaw. In these rustic surroundings, he was exposed to both the classics of keyboard music (including, significantly, those of Bach), by teachers who immediately recognized him as a prodigy, and to Polish folk music, which would be reflected in a pioneering musical nationalism. He quickly outstripped the talents of most of Warsaw's top piano and composition teachers, and when he graduated from the Main School of Music in 1829, professor Józef Elsner pronounced him a genius. That year, Chopin set out on a tour of Austria, Germany, and France. During this period, he wrote his two piano concertos, which contain much of the typical brilliant style of virtuoso piano music of the era, but show the development of a gift for distinctive melody, both ornate and emotionally deep. Chopin returned to Warsaw but departed again, first for Vienna, where he heard news that Poland's uprising against its Russian, Prussian, and Austrian rulers had failed. The Polish national spirit would pervade some of his larger works, including the so-called "Revolutionary" Etude (the Etude in C minor, Op. 10, No. 12). He was encouraged by composer Robert Schumann, who reviewed his Variations, Op. 2, with the words "Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!"

In 1832, Chopin headed for Paris, in many ways the center of European cultural life, and dazzled the city's musical elite, including Franz Liszt, in a concert at the Salle Pleyel. He immediately found himself in demand as a piano teacher, and soon he decided to settle in Paris, although he always hoped to return to Poland. He performed at aristocratic salons, cultivating then-new genres such as the étude (the word means "study," but in Chopin's hands it became much more), the nocturne, the waltz, and, in a Polish vein, the mazurka and the polonaise. After a planned marriage to a Polish girl, Maria Wodzinska, fell through, Chopin met writer Aurore Dudevant, who used the pen name George Sand. The pair began a torrid affair (Sand was married) and traveled together in 1838 to Mallorca, Spain, where they found the local citizenry disapproving of their unconventional relationship and were forced to lodge in a disused monastery. Chopin's creativity was fired, and he would write brilliantly innovative sets of piano music over the next few years. However, the weather turned cold in the winter of 1838-1839, and Chopin's health worsened as he and Sand lived in the unheated building; he was probably already suffering from tuberculosis. Back in France, Chopin and Sand took up residence in Paris and in summers at her estate in Nohant, where Chopin composed prolifically and the couple hosted painter Eugène Delacroix and other members of the cream of French artistic society. The romance cooled, though, and finally ended in 1847. One factor precipitating the breakup was Sand's negative portrayal of Chopin in her 1846 novel Lucrezia Floriani.

Chopin's health was also worsening badly; he found it difficult to perform and could no longer attract crowds as a virtuoso. During political unrest in Paris in 1848, Chopin fled to the British Isles. He performed in London (once for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert) and in Glasgow, where he was the subject of romantic interest from Scots noblewoman Jane Stirling. Chopin, however, remarked that he was "closer to the grave than the nuptial bed," and indeed in November of 1848 he gave what would be his last concert, for Polish refugees. He returned to Paris and continued to receive a steady stream of admirers despite what was clearly a terminal illness; singer Pauline Viardot, according to historians Kornel Michałowski and Jim Samson, remarked that "all the grand Parisian ladies considered it de rigueur to faint in his room." Chopin died in Paris on October 17, 1849. ~ James Manheim