The Chopin Currency - June 11th, 2008

Chopin News, Views, and Reviews:

A Comedic Ballet With Legs
Wall Street Journal - USA

WSJ critic marvels at the staying power of Jerome Robbins' Chopinistic comedic creation....

"Death," one showbiz quip has it, "is easy; comedy is hard." However savvy Jerome Robbins might have been in the mid-1950s as a still-budding master of both musical-theater dances and of classical ballet, he could hardly have predicted the staying power of "The Concert," the comedic ballet he created to Chopin in 1956 and called "A Charade in One Act" and subtitled "The Perils of Everybody."

Once his hilarious take on would-be concertgoers hit its stride with a 1971 restaging for his home-base company, the New York City Ballet, "The Concert" showed itself to be a deathless ballet comedy. In recent years, over a dozen ballet companies nationally and internationally, including one in Perm, Russia, have eagerly performed the work....

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Robbins & Chopin at NYC Ballet
By oberon481

Dance-focused blogger's taken on the Chopin/Robbins night at the NYC Ballet:

I'm not sure an all-Chopin evening is a great idea; surely the most effective programmes are those that offer musical contrasts. But THE CONCERT was fun tonight with Sterling Hyltin showing a nice flair for comedy (and dancing very well) and several amusing character players including Andrew Veyette's henpecked, vengeful husband and Gwyneth Muller's priceless wife with her droll efforts to maintain a sense of decorum.

Oberon's Grove - http://oberon481.typepad.com/oberons_grove/

Chopin in the Newsgroups:

Kobrins 2005 Chopin Preludes

From the rec.music.classical newsgroup, a discussion on the merits of Alexander Kobrin's Chopin interpretations...

Sure emphasizes the dark side, but very effective,original conceptions
seemingly not just for effect. He seems to empathize better with this more complex,subtle music than with the more
extroverted, emotional Rachmaninoff Etudes,IMHO. But this is
2005......

newsgroups.derkeiler.com: rec.music.c... - http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.music.classical.recordings

The Chopin Currency - June 8th, 2008

Chopin News, Views, and Reviews:

'The Spies of Warsaw' by Alan Furst
Los Angeles Times - CA,USA

"Furst's books are like Chopin's nocturnes: timeless, transcendent, universal. One does not so much read them as fall under their spell and to fall in love with those Romantic impulses that compel men and women to act beyond their self-interests."

And, like Chopin, Furst is a Romantic. Regardless of their gender or nationalities, his characters share one immutable trait: a heroic belief in the transformative power of love, whether for a nation, an ideal or another human being.

"The Spies of Warsaw" is Furst's 10th novel. Like the others, it involves the work of European spies in the 1930s and '40s. Few writers tread such a narrow path so often. Fewer still do it without repeating themselves. Furst's genius is to revisit the same era and character types while making each journey new and fascinating.

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Author Q&A
Wall Street Journal - USA

No reference to Chopin, but a fascinating Q & A with author Alan Furst...

In Alan Furst's newly published espionage novel, "The Spies of Warsaw," he paints a convincing portrait of Europe in 1937, told in part through the eyes of a French military attaché. That Mr. Furst's book is atmospheric, convincing and filled with twists and turns will hardly surprise readers of his nine earlier spy books such as "Night Soldiers" and "Kingdom of Shadows."

Mr. Furst, 67 years old, turned to espionage after writing four earlier novels that didn't sell. A Manhattan native, Mr. Furst lives in Sag Harbor, N.Y., and periodically in Paris. He estimates he has lived in France for roughly 10 years of his life.

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A Night for Robbins to Give Chopin a Twirl or Three
New York Times - United States

This seems to be shaping up as the Year of Jerome Robbins...

Jerome Robbins would remain one of the most diverse, successful and appealing choreographers of all time if he had never set anything to the music of Chopin. Yet to imagine ballet without Robbins’s Chopin works is to imagine a painful diminution. Though the current Robbins retrospective from New York City Ballet has been successfully under way for over a month, its “Definitive Chopin” program, which opened on Wednesday night at the State Theater, brings us closer to the choreographer’s heart than any other evening this season.

The program contains just three ballets. (Robbins’s “In the Night,” to Chopin nocturnes, was part of a separate bill that went out of repertory Thursday night.) It begins with a film clip of Robbins in 1990 rehearsing Darci Kistler in his first Chopin work, “The Concert” (1956). She’s really good, but he’s much better, wonderfully funny in the way the music makes him go weak at the knees: not an immediate collapse, but a rich, rippling-through-the-body plunge...

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The Chopin Currency - March 14, 2008

Kicking against convention: a scene from The Concert, a clever and ...
This is London - London,England,UK

Another one of Jerome Robbins' famous interpretations of Chopin, from the New York City Ballet performance at the London Coliseum....(be sure to read the Comments for an opposing viewpoint)

The Concert, for example, is a clever and poignant take on Chopin that gently mocks the absurdities of ballet and the suggestibility of music. ...
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'I Think of Us as a Musical Species'
Spiegel Online - Berlin,Germany

Chopin is on the mind of noted neurologist and author ("Musicophilia") Dr. Oliver Sacks...

Oliver Sacks: A Chopin mazurka is coming to me. It is one in B flat major, and I feel an itch in my hands to play it. I can sort of see the keyboard in ...
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Chopin in the Blogosphere:

Lang Lang @ Kennedy Center
ionarts by Charles T. Downey | Thursday, March 13, 2008

D.C.-area arts & culture blog weighs in on Lang Lang's Monday night recital: Praise for Bartok; horror for Chopin:

With the final work, Chopin's A-flat polonaise (op. 53), and the encores, Lang seemed to be making up for lost time, trying to inject a whole evening's virtuosity into the space of a few minutes. The Chopin came across like a Duchamp-esque rewrite of a familiar masterpiece, played so fast that all of Chopin's operatic relish of bel canto flourishes was simply steamrollered over in the process. The first encore, a Chopin étude (op. 10, no. 3), was calm and sad, with a blindingly fast middle section.

Martha Argerich Plays Chopin: The Legendary 1965 Recording
By admin0

Superlatives for a long-suppressed recording out on CD:

Lost is Found, finally
This Argerich Chopin performance, recorded by EMI in 1965 while she was actually under contract to DG is formidable for an artist so early in her career. Both the artistry and sound are superb and it’s a shame we fans had to wait so long for this recording to appear. These Chopin performances completely justify the competition judges decision to award her the grand prize at the 1965 Warsaw International Chopin Competition. It’s a collection must have!

Chopin himself would have gone into ecstasy listening to Martha Argerich play his music. It is impossible to find anyone else with such incredible, awesome, impossible ability to impart such emotional energy to a piano. ...
Seek & Buy Audio CD - http://vinylrecords.890m.com/wordpress

♯Four
By Frederic Francois Chopin(Frederic Francois Chopin)

Another "journal entry" from our favorite poet of the piano....(note: must be 14 to enter site...)

So it would seem I have been using my days to find inspiration for my music, and have yet to come across any such inspiration on my part. It is rather down hearting to not be able to find anything I can use as inspiration for my music; ...
The piano is his way of life - http://pianopoet.livejournal.com/