There is something quietly moving about a great pianist choosing to title a record not "The Complete This" or "The Definitive That," but simply The Chopin I Love. It is a small act of honesty, and it tells you everything about the spirit in which the British pianist Peter Donohoe has approached his latest release.
Out on SOMM Recordings on 17 July 2026, the album continues one of the most satisfying late-career threads in British pianism. Presto Music featured it in their new release round-up, sitting alongside a Franco-Belgian recital from Elena Urioste and Tom Poster and Schubert from George Xiaoyuan Fu.
A long conversation with one composer
This is not Donohoe's first visit to Chopin on the label. He recorded the 2nd and 3rd Sonatas in 2023 and a disc of Waltzes in 2024, and those releases were warmly received. So this new album feels less like a one-off and more like the next chapter in a slow, deliberate acquaintance, the kind of relationship with a composer that only deepens with the decades.
The programme is built around the complete Preludes, Op. 28, that extraordinary set of twenty-four miniatures that races from a wisp of an idea to a thunderclap and back again. Around them Donohoe places two of Chopin's grandest single-movement statements: the Barcarolle, Op. 60 and the Polonaise-fantaisie, Op. 61. SOMM notes that the Barcarolle draws on the rocking rhythm of the traditional song of Venetian gondoliers, and it is one of the most demanding poems in the repertoire to hold together.
Why the Preludes reward a lifetime
As a pianist, I find the Op. 28 Preludes endlessly humbling. Each one is a complete world in a page or two, and the challenge is not so much the notes as the timing, the tone, the silence between the pieces. You cannot fake a Chopin Prelude. Either the phrase breathes or it does not. That is exactly why they suit an artist at Donohoe's stage: someone with nothing left to prove and everything still to say.
Donohoe was a joint prize winner at the 1982 International Tchaikovsky Competition, and much of his reputation was built on the heavyweight Russian repertoire, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Scriabin. As one reviewer put it, that reputation can obscure a brand of musical honesty that gives him authority across a much wider range. Chopin, it turns out, is a natural home for that honesty.
The pleasure of a curated recital
I have a soft spot for albums assembled the way a thoughtful recital is, rather than by catalogue logic. A pianist saying, in effect, here are the pieces I keep coming back to, is far more inviting than a box set. It gives the listener a way in. You are not being handed an encyclopedia; you are being welcomed into someone's living room and shown the music that has kept them company for a lifetime.
That is close to how I think about my own recital programmes. The pieces I return to most, whether Chopin, Debussy or the chamber works I share with colleagues, tend to be the ones that reveal something new every time I sit down with them. If you would like to hear how that plays out live, you are always welcome to explore my upcoming concerts or get in touch about booking a recital or chamber programme.
A recording to sit with
What I most look forward to with a release like this is not fireworks but patience. Chopin at his greatest asks for a player who will let the music unfold at its own pace, and Donohoe has spent a career earning the right to do exactly that. The Chopin I Love looks set to be an album to live with rather than merely admire, and in a busy world that is no small thing.
