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It seems appropriate that pianist Seong-Jin Cho's official debut recording would feature the music of Frédéric Chopin, given that he won the Sixth Moscow International Frederick Chopin Competition for Young Pianists in 2008, when he was 14 years old. Other high-profile competition finishes after that led to appearances with internationally known orchestras and conductors.

Cho was born in Seoul on May 28, 1994. He began playing the piano at six and was only 11 when he gave his first recital. Following his Young Pianists win in 2008, Cho became the youngest ever to win Japan's Hamamatsu International Piano Competition in 2009 and captured third prize in the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 2011. He moved from his native Seoul to Paris in 2012 to study with Michel Béroff.

When Cho participated in the 2015 International Chopin Piano Competition, Deutsche Grammophon recorded his concerto performance and rush-released it. It became a best-seller in Korea and Poland, even topping the Korean pop chart. The label then signed Cho and issued his official debut album in 2016. The 2016-2017 season had Cho traveling in Asia with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra and in Europe with Mikhail Pletnev and the Russian National Orchestra, and making his recital debuts in Carnegie Hall and the Royal Concertgebouw, among other places. 2017 also saw the release of a Debussy recital. The following year, he released an album of music by Mozart, with Yannick-Nézet-Seguin and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. In 2020, Cho issued a recording of music by Schubert, Liszt, and Berg titled The Wanderer. ~ Patsy Morita & Keith Finke

Maurice Ravel was among the most significant and influential composers of the early 20th century. Although he is frequently linked with Claude Debussy as an exemplar of musical impressionism, and some of their works have a surface resemblance, Ravel possessed an independent voice that grew out of his love of a broad variety of styles, including the French Baroque, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Spanish folk traditions, and American jazz and blues. His elegant and lyrically generous body of work was not large in comparison with that of some of his contemporaries, but his compositions are notable for being meticulously and exquisitely crafted. He was especially gifted as an orchestrator, an area in which he remains unsurpassed.

Ravel's mother was of Basque heritage, a fact that accounted for his lifelong fascination with Spanish music, and his father was a Swiss inventor and engineer, most likely the source of his commitment to precision and craftsmanship. At the age of 14, he entered the Paris Conservatory, where he was a student from 1889 to 1895 and from 1897 to 1903. His primary composition teacher was Gabriel Fauré. A major disappointment of his life was his failure to win the Prix de Rome in spite of numerous attempts. The difficulty was transparently the conflict between the conservative administration of the Conservatory and Ravel's independent thinking, meaning his association with the French avant-garde (Debussy), and his interest in non-French traditions (Wagner, the Russian nationalists, Balinese gamelan). He had already established himself as a composer of prominence with works such as his String Quartet, and the piano pieces Pavane pour une infante défunte, Jeux d'eau, and the Sonatine, and his loss of the Prix de Rome in 1905 was considered such a scandal that the director of the Conservatory was forced to resign.

Ravel continued to express admiration for Debussy's music throughout his life, but as his own reputation grew stronger during the first decade of the century, a mutual professional jealousy cooled their personal relationship. Around the same time, he developed a friendship with Igor Stravinsky. The two became familiar with each other's work during Stravinsky's time in Paris and worked collaboratively on arrangements for Sergey Diaghilev.

Between 1909 and 1912, Ravel composed Daphnis et Chloé for Diaghilev and Les Ballets Russes. It was the composer's largest and most ambitious work and is widely considered his masterpiece. He wrote a second ballet for Diaghilev, La Valse, which the impresario rejected, but which went on to become one of his most popular orchestral works. Following his service in the First World War as an ambulance driver and the death of his mother in 1917, his output was temporarily diminished. In 1925, the Monte Carlo Opera presented the premiere of another large work, the "lyric fantasy" L'enfant et les sortilèges, a collaboration with writer Colette.

American jazz and blues became increasingly intriguing to the composer. In 1928 he made a hugely successful tour of North America, where he met George Gershwin and had the opportunity to broaden his exposure to jazz. Several of his most important late works, such as the Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 and the Piano Concerto in G show the influence of that interest.

Ironically, Ravel, who in his youth was rejected by some elements of the French musical establishment for being a modernist, in his later years was scorned by Satie and the members of Les Six as being old-fashioned, a symbol of the establishment. In 1932, an injury he sustained in an automobile accident started a physical decline that resulted in memory loss and an inability to communicate. He died in 1937, following brain surgery.

In spite of leaving one of the richest and most important bodies of work of any early 20th century composer, one that included virtually every genre except for symphony and liturgical music, Ravel is most often remembered for an arrangement of another composer's work, and for a piece he considered among his least significant. His orchestral arrangement of Mussorgsky's piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition has been wildly popular with concertgoers (and the royalties from it made Ravel a rich man). Boléro, a 15-minute Spanish dance in which a single theme is repeated in a variety of instrumental guises, has been ridiculed for its insistent repetitiveness, but it is also a popular favorite and one of the most familiar and frequently performed orchestral works of the 20th century. ~ Stephen Eddins