The Complete Chopin Collection (2015)

Musopen, Frédéric Chopin, Edward Neeman, Maxim Anikushin, Ilya Friedberg, Kei Takumi, Alexander Kobrin · 2015 · 540 min

Musopen's second Kickstarter, 2013: "Set Chopin Free". Ninety thousand dollars from the public paid a handful of concert pianists to record every piece Chopin published — the ballades, scherzos, nocturnes, mazurkas, polonaises, études, preludes, waltzes, the two concertos' solo parts, the songs — and to give the lot away with no strings, so that a film-maker, a teacher, a dance class or a listener could use a real performance of any Chopin without a licence fee. Where the Open Goldberg made one great work free, this made a whole composer free.

It is a collection rather than a recital, and it sounds like one: five pianists, several pianos, a few years. Start with the ballades and the Op. 28 preludes, which are the strongest sets; the mazurkas, all fifty-odd of them, are the shelf's long tail. Nine hours or so, as lossless files from Musopen's own upload.

Chosen copy: Musopen's own Internet Archive item musopen-chopin, uploaded by the project's founder 2015-01-29 — 82 Apple Lossless (.m4a) files and 22 MP3s that exist only in that format, 104 files, 3.21 GB, with the project's PDF booklet. Files are named by work, not numbered; the set is a collection, so there is no running order to verify — completeness is checked against the collection's own track list in the booklet.

The Archive.org metadata publishes no durations for the lossless files; the runtime above is an estimate from the file sizes (ALAC at roughly 800 kbps) and should be read as about nine hours. Musopen's own collection page is the reference copy.

Two layers, both free:

• The compositions. Chopin, published 1825–1849, and no post-1931 edition is involved — these are performances, not reprints.
• The recordings. Released under CC0 1.0 Universal, the Archive.org item's own licence URL, uploaded by Musopen itself; the collection page states "released under the CC Public Domain Mark". Commissioned specifically to be given away, with the performers paid by the Kickstarter. Performers credited here from the project's own page — the item's metadata names none, and house style credits people regardless.