....a roundup of Chopiniana: current news, views, reviews, recordings and performances in the runup to the 200th birthday of the matchless Polish keyboard composer.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

The Chopin Currency - Ides of March Edition


Chopin Video of the Day:

Kurikinton Fox - F.Chopin - fantasy impromptu in Guitar!!!

Not bad at all!

This is Fantasy Impromptu AKA Gino's piece. These guys did this in g-tar...Amazing:D.
music is everything, everything is music - http://fluteguitar.multiply.com/


Chopin News, Reviews, and Previews:

Concert pianist favourite returns
Huddersfield Examiner - Huddersfield,UK

Local favorita Evgenia Rubinova returns to play the Chopin First Concerto at the Huddersfield Town Hall...

In an evening full of festivity and celebration, she will be playing works by Shostakovich, Chopin and Prokofiev. Shostakovich’s Festival Overture premiered ...
See all stories on this topic




A Classic Contrast (Or So It Seems)
Washington Post - United States


Washington Post critic Anne Midgette weighs the consecutive recital appearances by Yundi Li and Lang Lang, and decide maybe they're not so different after all...

Tuesday's concert at the Kennedy Center bore out the idea (formed at several concerts over the past few years) that Lang Lang, after the stunning promise of his 2001 Carnegie Hall debut, has become one of the most maddening pianists on Earth. He can make any musical passage crass, coarse and bombastic. He can also create moments of breathtaking beauty. And a listener never knows which is coming next.....The Bartok sonata, played from sheet music with a spasmodic hysteria that produced the aural equivalent of dry heaves in places, and Chopin's A-flat Polonaise, of which he made an unequivocal hash, shredding the whole line of the piece in tantrums of pedal and fingerwork.

At Strathmore the following night, Yundi Li appeared a contrast indeed: well-bred, elegant, demure, the epitome of good taste, so sober as to be a little boring until he unleashed some virtuoso fireworks of his own. He opened with a supremely classical take on Mozart's K.330, crisp and light, and continued with a selection of his calling-card composer, Chopin, playing the Op. 33 mazurkas, the nocturne Op. 9, No. 2, and the showy Op. 22 "Grande Polonaise Brillante," with a detour into the Liszt/Schumann "Widmung" to underscore the lyrical singing lines of his playing. There is nothing effete about his Chopin; it is sensitive but strong.

.....

if both are expressing the same thing, Yundi Li is expressing it less colorfully. His program was the more conventional, the one we are supposed to like.But thinking it over afterward, I found I had, as a listener, been more engaged by my annoyance at Lang Lang than my distant approval of Yundi Li.


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Another Chopin Video

Cecile Licad Playing Chopin Ballade G-Moll Op.23
Philippines' Finest Cecile Licad playing Chopin (pronounced as Sho-pan) Ballade G-moll Op.
Everyone Has a Dark Side... I... - http://alexskywalker.multiply.com/






Chopin in the Blogosphere:

Celebrities play chess
By Nikita

Look at the company Fryderyk is keeping at the Chessboard..

Artists and musicians: Bono (U2), Madonna, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Guy Ritchie, Frank Sinatra, Salvador Dali, Ludwig van Beethoven, David Bowie, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Sting, Enrico Caruso, Ray Charles, Cher, Frederic Chopin, ...
Chessalee - http://chessaleeinlondon.wordpress.com

♯Five
By Frederic Francois Chopin(Frederic Francois Chopin)

Another installment from the pianopoet...(must be 14 to enter site...)

Am I truly happy with what I did? Thinking back on it now, I'm not so sure I am. I understand what all of us went through, the trials and tribulations we surpassed to get where we were. Then for everything to finally reach the end...the ...
The piano is his way of life - http://pianopoet.livejournal.com/


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....is a roundup of all things Chopin leading up to the 200th anniversary of the matchless Polish composer for the piano in March 2010.