The Chopin Currency: April 30, 2008

Chopin News, Reviews & Previews:

SWEET TRILOGY
San Diego Jewish Journal - CA, USA

An interview with Hershey Felder in the run-up to a San Diego presentation of all three of his one-man shows: "Beethoven At I Knew Him," "Monsieur Chopin," and "George Gershswin Alone."

San Diego theater aficionados will certainly remember Felder for last year’s showstopper “George Gershwin Alone,” which sold out seats and kept audience members singing all the way home. Felder did more than portray the American music master, he became him.

He followed the same formula in his return months later with “Monsieur Chopin,” bringing the intensely emotional 19th century pianist to life in ways most audience members had never imagined.

At press time, he was neck-deep in rehearsals for the final piece in his composer trilogy, aptly titled, “Beethoven, As I Knew Him.”

“This is the completion,” Felder says over the phone. “We’re going backwards.”

All three parts of the trilogy are one-man shows, marked by Felder’s incredible ability to be both pianist and character actor. In order to provide both a show and an accurate history lesson, hours upon hours of research are required.

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Chosen by Chopin
Thanh Nien Daily - Ho Chi Minh City,Vietnam

More press for Chopin Competition winner Dang Thai Son during his tour of his Vietnamese homeland....

When he was 12, his mother, one of the first Vietnamese pianists to graduate from the Prague Music Conservatory in what was then Czechoslovakia, brought him some CD’s featuring Chopin’s music from the International Chopin Competition she took part in.

The youngster was mesmerized by the master’s works.

His love affair with the piano and Chopin’s music had begun.

“Whenever I play his music, I feel as if it speaks about my own life and expresses my own thoughts and emotions,” Son says.

“The piano and Chopin’s works have kept me good company since I was young."...

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Chopin Downloads:

Wibi Soerjadi - Plays Chopin (1998)
By freebook

Free download of Chopin works by the Dutch pianist...

Wibi Soerjadi - Plays Chopin (1998). Classical | 1998 | FLAC (single files) | 293 MB. RS.com | 4 files | booklet scans | 01:17:22 | Philips. Wibi Soerjadi was born in 1970 in Leiden, Netherlands. After only four years of studying at the ...
Free Book Source - http://freebooksource.com

The Chopin Currency - April 24, 2008

Chopin News, Reviews, and Previews:
Piano Man on a Mission

Miami New Times - Miami,FL,USA

Fascinating story of the "self-taught classical pianist" Kristopher Hull, who's now taking his Chopin-heavy act to the streets of Miami as a "Pianist Errant"

This past February 27 would come to be known as Kristopher Hull's Worst Day Ever. Armed with a full-size upright piano, a repertoire of Chopin's etudes and nocturnes, and his nerves, the 33-year-old pianist planned to storm Lincoln Road, guerrilla-style. He was going to bring classical music out of the concert hall and into the streets.

Inspired by his fictional role model, Don Quixote, Hull was in the early days of his quest, which he called "pianist errantry." He was accompanied by a pal, Swedish-born photographer Victor Staaffe, who was documenting the whole thing. Together that sunny afternoon, they unloaded Hull's piano from the back of his aquamarine pickup truck....

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Concert will feature 'jazz on a classical guitar'
Post-Bulletin - Rochester,MN,USA

Jazz guitarist Gene Bertoncini is poised to showcase his classical chops with the Rochestra Symphony Orchestra...

He'll play three arrangements with the orchestra, two of them melding classical pieces with jazz tunes. The first combines Chopin's Prelude in E flat with Antonio Carlos Jobim's "How Insensitive." The second starts with Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez and becomes Chick Corea's "Spain."

The works fit the Latin theme of the concert. "You can't get more Latin than the title of 'Spain,'" Bertoncini said.

Jobim borrowed from Chopin's Prelude and added a bossanova beat for "How Insensitive."

"I heard a pianist do it the same way when I was on the 'Tonight Show,'" Bertoncini said. "I always remembered that." He simply transferred it to guitar.

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World-acclaimed Vietnamese pianist to release new CD
Viet Nam News - Hanoi,Vietnam

More about the Chopin-heavy CD-and-book releases in Vietnam by native son (and 1980 Chopin Competition winner) Dang Thai Son...

A CD compilation of Vietnamese high profile pianist Dang Thai Son’s favourite classical pieces hits the streets next Friday.

Distributed by the Phuong Nam Film Company, the collection includes 13 CDs, previously released by Japan’s Victor Entertainment Inc. (JVC). The CDs include Tchaikovsky, Men-delssohn, Liszt, Ravel and Debussy scores, and nine devoted entirely to Chopin.

According to director of Phuong Nam Film Phan Mong Thuy, the company has spent four months securing distribution rights from JVC.

"In presenting the CDs of famous pianist Dang Thai Son, our company is doing its utmost to bring Vietnamese audiences valued musical products," Thuy said.

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SFIFF: Ashes to ashes
San Francisco Bay Guardian - San Francisco,CA,USA

Another mention of the acclaimed indie documentary film Forever:

SFIFF One of the greatest pleasures of the 50th SF International Film Festival was Forever, Heddy Honigmann's 2006 study of the living among the dead at Paris' Père-Lachese cemetery. Between footage of the sun-dappled necropolis in all its hushed, springtime glory, Honigmann (who received last year's Persistence of Vision award) profiles several regular visitors, who in the course of discussing an attachment to a particular resident — whether that dweller be Frédéric Chopin or a deceased husband — reveal a great deal about how we commune with memory in our daily lives.

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Chopin in the Blogosphere:

Dancing about music
By Thomasina

A "distinterested plug" by a Down Under blogger for a quadruple-bill Jerome Robbins Celebration, by the Australian Ballet...

1. The Concert
This is one of the sweetest, funniest, most entertaining ballets I’ve ever seen. The pianist on stage performs a recital of Chopin. The dancers are the audience – behaving in all the ways that audiences do, including sitting in the wrong seats – and they dance out their fantasies in the most delightful ways. Did I mention I adore this ballet?

Thomasina’s last waltz - http://frindley.typepad.com/colophon/

Chopin and Callas worshippers
By Gillibrand(Gillibrand)

Can be found at the Church of St Julien le Pauvre in Paris. Since 1889, the home of the Melkites in Paris.

Catholic Church Conservation - http://cathcon.blogspot.com/

The Chopin Currency: April 22, 2008

Chopin News, Reviews, and Previews:

Pianist Born to the Colors of Chopin
New York Times - United States

Veteran New York Times critic Bernard Holland isn't thrilled about Ingrid Fliter's Beethoven and Schubert, but is charmed by her Chopin:

The Ingrid Fliter who appeared after intermission was a different person. She was born to play Chopin, and she knows it. The colors are many and subtle, the range of loud to soft is unusually various, and she has the sensibility for Chopin’s graceful, linear give-and-take. The pieces were the Nocturne in B and the B minor Piano Sonata. The Met Museum’s audience liked both very much.

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Cliburn Gold Medal winner's performance "impeccable"
Montgomery Advertiser - Montgomery,AL,USA

Meanwhile, a Montgomery (Alabama) critic finds the Beethoven and Chopin performances by Van Cliburn Competition winner Alex Kobrin to be indistinguishable, which is a good thing...

Six Chopin pieces followed – the heroic G minor “Ballade” to start this section, the dramatic F minor “Ballade” to end it, and in between four “Impromptus,” the last of which was the familiar “Fantasie-Impromptu” best known for its lyrical second theme.

For a gold medal winner, there is no need to comment on technique. It was impeccable as expected. But what distinguished this pianist was his thoughtful approach to every phrase. In the most cerebral, expressive phrases he slowed the tempo but never lost the intensity of those phrases and found significance in each note. He saved speed for the most impassioned sections.

His program showed a special affinity for the Romantics, drawing flowing melodies and dramatic climaxes from both Beethoven and Chopin. Both composers had much the same style in Kobrin’s playing.

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Phuong Nam to release 13 albums by pianist Dang Thai Son
VietNamNet Bridge - Hanoi,Vietnam

Vietnamese press agency announces the release of the biography and a baker's dozen of recordings by Vietnamese favorite-son pianist, (winner of the 1980 Chopin Competition) as he prepares to return to his hometown of Ho Chi Minh City...

Victor Entertainment permitted Vietnam’s Phuong Nam Film to release this collection. These are high-quality products which bring listeners poetic melodies by Tchaikovsky and romantic rhythms by Mendelssohn, Liszt, the sophistication of Ravel, and especially, immortal melodies by Chopin, whose music works account for around nine of the 13 CDs.

For the first time, the book “A pianist loved by Chopin – the Dang Thai Son story”, published by Yahama Music Media Corporation in Japan in 2003, will be published in Vietnam. The book’s author is Japanese journalist Ikuma Yoshiko, who loves the Vietnamese pianist’s music.

Dang Thai Son is the first Asian artist to win first prize at the Concours Chopin and the pianist holds the highest number of sub-prizes in the history of this music award. American pianist Isaac Stern (1920-2001), who received a Grammy for lifetime achievement in 1987, said Dang Thai Son is a musical genius.

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Richard Goode's Gilmore Festival Prelude recital worth the wait ...
Kalamazoo Gazette - MLive.com - Kalamazoo,MI,USA

Goode plays great Chopin (among other things) at the Gilmore....

Nocturne in C Minor, Op. 48, No. 1, was first of several Chopin works. Goode's playing here showed superlative use of dynamics and miraculous control of octave runs. Of four Chopin Mazurkas performed, the E Minor, Op. 41, No. 2, most engaged the large audience by virtue of an ingratiating mellow effect. [...]

Three final Chopin pieces ended the program. Scherzo No. 4 in E Major, Op. 54, was my favorite. Goode invested drama in a work that featured a steady thematic line surrounded by bustling musical ornaments. Goode's quick hands gloriously executed chromatic runs and challenging arpeggios. The other pieces, fine overall, were blemished by Goode's stomping foot. The encore -- what else?: another Chopin "bijou."

Goode's greatest strength was a consummate ability to convey beautiful musical sense, without injecting a performer's egoistic detractions.

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Chopin in the Blogosphere:

Cultured Tangos
Blogcritics.org - Aurora,OH,USA

Yesterday it was Enrique Granados being called "The Brazilian Chopin." Today a Blogcritics magazine writer likens Chopin to Argentinian tango-master Astor Piazzolla...

It may be that in musical retrospect, from a luxury of twenty-twenty critical hindsight, that Astor Piazzolla will be seen as having done in the twentieth century for the tango what Frederick Chopin did in the nineteenth for the waltz. It is perhaps already an accepted position. With the waltz, Chopin took an established popular form and stretched its boundaries so that what an audience might have expected to be a little ditty was recast to express heroism, sensuality, pride, or even occasional doubt. The little dance tune then, in Chopin's slender hands, became an elegant art form, highly expressive, utterly Romantic in its ability to convey human emotion....

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Fun With Chopin

The planned Chopin marathon on BBC Radio 3 prompts a Brit blogger's musings on Chopiniana...

I ask him if he’s seen the romantic comedy Impromptu, starring a pre-Richard Curtis Hugh Grant as the consumptive composer:

http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0102103/

It’s one of my favourite movies that people haven’t heard of. The director is James Lapine, better known for the original stagings of Sondheim musicals like Sunday In The Park With George and Into The Woods, and it has the same sense of anachronistic wit in a period setting, not least Judy Davis’s constant exclamation of ‘Balls!’

In fact, it ties in with my theme of the other day - a romance between a butch woman (Ms Davis as the cross-dressing novelist George Sand) and a fragile, stuttering man with floppy hair (guess who). Add Emma Thompson as a dim aristocrat, and Mandy Patinkin in funny, swaggering Princess Bride mode, and it’s something of a gem. How much of the Chopin history is correct I have no idea, but I’d say the film could be compared with Moulin Rouge and the BBC version of Casanova (the one with David Tennant), in eschewing period accuracy in favour of unabashed fun.

Diary at the Centre of the Earth - http://dickonedwards.co.uk/diary