The Chopin Currency - July 6, 2008

Chopin News, Reviews, and Previews:

‘The Year of Sembrich’ features pianist Simon Mulligan as part of ...
Schenectady Gazette - Schenectady,NY,USA

News of a series of events marking the 150th anniversary of the birth of Polish-American soprano and vocal instructor Marcella Sembrich, (1858-1935) sponsored by the Marcella Sembrich Opera Museum on the shores of Lake George, NY. "Programs will include works by composers she either knew personally or whose arias she sang — she took walks with Brahms and discussed the fine points of vocal production with Puccini."

A Frederic Chopin Festival will be held from July 23 to 27. “It’s an apt time,” said Richard Wargo, the museum’s artistic director and opera composer. “Sembrich was born 10 years after Chopin’s death. She was very particular to end her solo recitals with his ‘A Maiden’s Wish’, in which she sang and played piano. Because he was her compatriot, we thought him a likely composer to celebrate.” Both she and Chopin were Polish.

Pianist Simon Mulligan will set the tone of the season at his recital on Saturday, July 12, with a program that includes Liszt’s “Reminiscences of Lucia”, Chopin’s Ballade in G minor and his “Raindrop” Prelude and Mulligan’s own transcription of Offenbach’s Barcarolle from “The Tales of Hoffman.”

[...]

The Chopin Festival (July 23 to 27) begins at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday with Ruth Albert Spencer’s talk on the liaison between the writer George Sand and Chopin. Pianist Christopher Johnson will also play.

“It’s the scholarly approach as opposed to the Hollywood fanfare of the film ‘Impromptu,’ ” Wargo said.

The 1991 movie will be shown at no charge that night at 7:30 p.m. in the Bolton Town Hall.

On Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, pianist Diana Fanning will play several solo Chopin works and with cellist Dieuke Davydov will play Chopin’s Cello Sonata and his Polonaise Brilliante. Johnson returns at 7:30 p.m. Friday with narrator Lindsay Gates, who will give a dramatic reading about Chopin’s affair with the singer Jenny Lind, known as the Swedish Nightingale.

In 1848, Chopin was broken in health and spirit after his breakup with Sand and took a trip to England and Scotland, where he met Lind.

“She wanted to marry him, but Chopin felt it was too late,” Wargo said.

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Chopin Videos:

F.Chopin "Valse a moll" "Chopin-Pragnienie milosci"
By Daria(Daria)

From the Famous Polka Dancers and Musicians blogsite, Chopin on the Squeezebox...

Frederic Chopin`s "Waltz in a minor", romantic music from the movie "Chopin: The need for love". Solo accordion Miroslaw Marks.

Famous Polka Dancers and Musicians - http://famouspolkadancers.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

The Chopin Currency - March 7. 2008

Chopin News, Previews, Rants, and Reviews:

Live: Lang Lang

Yesterday we brought you two views of Yundi Li; today it's the "other" superstar Chinese pianist's turn. Mark Swed of the LA Times is both impressed and appalled:

Tuesday night, he [Lang Lang] returned to Walt Disney Concert Hall for a recital. The place was, inevitably, packed. The audience was antsy, wanting fireworks, and Lang Lang eventually delivered. First, though, he had to prove he was a poet.

"He is a poet. But he is an immature poet with a nuclear arsenal, and that makes him a very dangerous poet. The nuclear part of the weaponry is a killer technique. The threat is in the delivery system. He has the charisma to hold an audience in his power. Responsibility, though, is another matter....

"Lang Lang has inherited Liberace's curse. Once the audience knows what he can do, he must give it what it wants. And each time, he must outdo himself. In the single encore, Chopin's Etude, Opus 10, No. 3, he outdid himself....

Read the Entire Story

Flashy pianist Lang startlingly graceful in Houston show

The headlines says it all...Houston Chronicle reviewer Everett Evans on the hand is pleasantly surprised...

"Lang Lang is renowned for flash as well as artistry — and he didn't disappoint fans on either count in his performance of Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 Thursday night with the Houston Symphony. Yet the predominant quality that distinguished his performance was grace.

"The famous mannerisms, swaying moves and transported expressions — symbols of the artist not only performing but feeling the music — were present, but less frequent and more subdued than in some of his past performances. But then Chopin is not Beethoven nor Rachmaninoff and this work calls for a more quicksilver approach, more moments of delicacy and fewer of bravado."

Houston Chronicle - United States
By EVERETT EVANS Lang Lang is renowned for flash as well as artistry — and he didn't disappoint fans on either count in his performance of Chopin's Piano ...
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Renowned pianist next door

A preview of a Baltimore-area recital by Korean-turned-Columbia, MD resident Eun Joo Chung, which includes with a bravura piece of Chopiniana:

Chopin paired the serenely rippling Andante spianato with its extroverted and rousing opposite, the Grande Polonaise Brillante in E flat major, which was originally written for piano and orchestra..

While Sunday's program certainly requires virtuosity, Chung hopes that the audience will take away something more. "If the performer is able to invite me into the music, I feel that it is a very intimate conversation taking place as opposed to a show or a display," she says.

Baltimore Sun - United States
With the exception of the Chopin, the music on the program is based on variation; a short musical phrase is repeated and developed, becoming more intricate ...
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Chopin: Preludes; etc, Alexandre Tharaud

A more tepid review of the new Harmonia Mundi CD from the UK Guardian. Critic Andrew Clements likes the Chopin all right, but is less taken by the pairings...

He follows the Op 28 set of the 24 Preludes with a curious little sequence that interleaves more of Chopin's miniatures, including the three posthumous studies and the much more substantial C sharp minor Prelude Op 45, with three pieces by Frederic Mompou. Tharaud describes the Mompou as "a more recent, more intimate echo of the Chopin" and plays it with the same care and sensitivity he lavishes on the more famous works, without ever disguising the fact that it has very little real musical substance.

Guardian - UK
Though his repertory ranges from Couperin right up to Kagel, Chopin seems to be a speciality of Tharaud's. This disc of the Preludes follows an earlier one ...
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CHOPIN: Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 11; Piano Concerto No 2...

Nice review of Music & Arts reissue of pianist Paul Badura-Skoda's recording of the two piano concertos with Artur Rodzinski and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra:

"Badura-Skoda passes off Chopin’s roulades and tricky accents in the manner of an intimate series of etudes, here much closer to the Chopin who dazzled George Sand. Rarely does Badura-Skoda take a repeat in the same manner, always shading the rhythm or the harmony with subtle touches of diaphanous color. Formidable!"

Audiophile Audition - USA

The Viennese tradition in Badura-Skoda pays elegant stylistic homage to Chopin, though we could argue that the performances are more of Hummel than the ...
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Popcorn Panel: The Other Boleyn Girl

A trio of Canadian film critics nominate historical films they like a lot better than the current Portman/ScarJo bodice-ripper..."Impromptu" gets the nod from one.... "an emo late-80s movie about the love affair between Chopin and George Sand. Hugh Grant is appropriately floppy-haired as Chopin, and Judy David is an extremely overwrought George Sand. And Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin are in it for no apparent reason."

National Post - Toronto,Ontario,Canada

Almost as much as I loved Impromptu, an emo late-80s movie about the love affair between Chopin and George Sand. Hugh Grant is appropriately floppy-haired ...
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The Chopin Currency - Feb. 12, 2008

Chopin News, Reviews, & Previews:

CHOPIN: 24 Preludes, Op. 28; 3 Nouvelles Etudes; Prelude in A-flat ...
Audiophile Audition - USA

"Moravec--and now Tharaud--remind us how much of the Romantic keyboard rhetoric the Preludes subsume."
Tharaud performs his recital on an eight-year-old Steinway D, and its seductive character reveals itself in the less popular of the Chopin Preludes (1838), ...
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Concert Review: Piano recital
Jerusalem Post - Israel
By URY EPPSTEIN Sonia Rubinsky, a Brazilian-born guest pianist from Paris, presented a recital ranging from Mozart to Villa-Lobos to Chopin at the Jerusalem ...
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Pianist Fliter will perform in Fresno
Fresno Bee (subscription) - Fresno,CA,USA
Keyboard Concerts at Fresno State this week features Argentine pianist Ingrid Fliter, a previous prizewinner at the Busoni and Chopin International Piano ...
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Chopin in the blogosphere:

I Like Chopin
By 330670996@qq.com(^-^)
I Like Chopin Remember that piano So delightful, unusual That classic sensation Sentimental confusion Used to say I like Chopin Love me now and again Woh... Rainy days, never say good-bye To desire when we are together ...
^-^ - http://330670996.qzone.qq.com

Impromptu Part Deux
By admin
In response to a classmate who believes that French author Madam George Sand (Judy Davis) in James Lapine's 1991 film Impromptu, is "attracted to Chopin [(Hugh Grant)] because she unconsciously learned to be more feminine like he was," ...
- http://identitygang.com

Are audiobooks the same as reading?
By cjwriter
It’s an audiobook called The Chopin Manuscript and is being billed as the first-ever audio serial book. It’s written by 15 successful thriller writers; Jeffery Deaver conceived of the characters, story and wrote the first chapter, ...
CJ Writer - http://cjwriter.com