....a roundup of Chopiniana: current news, views, reviews, recordings and performances in the runup to the 200th birthday of the matchless Polish keyboard composer.
Orchestral romance: On April 26, [Kevin] Rhodes leads the orchestra in a program of central European charm and elegance, featuring Rossini's "Overture to Silken Staircase" ("La scala di seta"), Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 and Brahm's Symphony No. 3 in F Major. Pianist Claire Huangci, the winner of the 2006 Chopin Competition, is the soloist.
Ingrid Fliter clearly loves Chopin's music. The warmth of her playing and the lyrical impulse of her interpretations are combined with discretion in matters of dynamics, pianistic decoration and tonal colour to make these pieces flow from her fingers with the spontaneity of someone deeply immersed in the music's idiom.
Fliter's name might not yet be universally familiar here, but it will be. Born in Argentina, she came to prominence two years ago when she received the highly prized Gilmore Award in the United States, previously bestowed on such international artists as Piotr Anderszewski and Leif Ove Andsnes. Now that she is also a BBC New Generation Artist, opportunities to hear her will become more frequent.
Review of a revissue by the Israeli pianist that Audiophile Audition calls "A highly personal approach to the composer - less of Horowitz than of [Myeczyeslaw] Horszowski or [Benno] Moiseiwitsch, a combination of implosive technique and fervent devotion." As well as some fevered dreams....
Katz verbally recounts his experience with dreams, especially in relationship to the music of Chopin, “the genius of Chopin and not just the notes of Chopin.” The etude in double-thirds proved troubling to Katz: a dream involving Artur Rubinstein transpired, in which Rubinstein placed Katz’s hand on the keyboard to finger the etude. Somehow, in having practiced and performed the Tchaikovsky Concerto, Katz found the proper fingering for rendering the technique of the Chopin etude. In another dream, one involving a near-death experience, Katz discovered the proper touch and realization for the Funeral March Sonata.....Well-spoken, articulate, and poetically apt, Katz as raconteur and insightful artist makes a formidable combination well worth our undivided attentions. See all stories on this topic
Young Chopin Competition winner to appear at an Orange County vinyard...
The Chopin Foundation of the United States and Premier Virginia Properties are proud to present Jacek Kortus of Poland, the youngest finalist of the 2005 International Chopin Piano Competition, on his world piano tour.
Previewing his appearance in the Vermont capital, Quebec pianist shares his approach to Chopin:
André’s first point was that Chopin (1810-1849) was a great pianist, and that the piano, not other instruments or the orchestra, was his medium.
“So, you listen to purely Romantic music that was extraordinarily written for piano,” André said. “A lot of pianists are interested in playing Chopin because it’s wonderfully written for piano and, also, it’s wonderfully expressive.”
“He has something to say, but it’s very atmospheric, very imaginative, very colorful,” André went on. “He knew absolutely what you could do with the piano.” Still, a lot depends on the performer.
“If you add structure and add a sense of line, it becomes even more beautiful because it is so well composed,” André said. “With Chopin, you have everything that is pianistic, everything that’s musical, and everything that’s well put together.” André cited the B-Flat Minor Sonata....
The extreme precision of Neiman's playing displayed the details of Chopin's "Concerto No. 1" while his sensitive nuances imbued the work with emotional depth. Both soloist and orchestra dramatically contrasted the music's dainty passages with its fiery outbursts. The Symphony's fine Steinway, with its clear and vibrant tone, responded admirably in both the forceful and delicate realms. In the "Romance: Larghetto" movement, Neiman's piano set a dreamy ambiance above a seamless fabric of strings. The bassoon, played by Jane Orzel, sang beautifully in a rare romantic role. Though this concerto has no solo cadenzas, it brims with virtuosic passages, which Neiman executed with polish and verve.
Applause for Ax and his approach to the other Chopin concerto:
In the mid-1990s, Emanuel Ax decided to get a more intimate connection to the music of Chopin by recording on an Erard piano -- the same type on which the composer wrote many of his most famous works. His playing of Chopin since then has been greatly informed by this wise excursion from the concert grand, and yesterday he again found a way to bring that more agile sound to the larger tone of the Steinway.
Ax's light attack not only fit Chopin's phrasing for the pianist, but lent the concerto an improvisatory spirit (I could swear he gave a few extemporaneous flourishes, too). The only downside was it further exposed Chopin's stilted writing for orchestra. Clearly the best parts of this work occur when the pianist plays. Ax substituted for Alfred Brendel three weeks ago. It would be a shame not to hear him again for a while.
Baron said he can't resist the lure of playing vocal music arranged for piano.
"As pianists, we play on what we don't like to think of as a percussive instrument," he said.
"Many of us look at the voice as the ideal instrument. That's the challenge for me: to imitate a crescendo on a single note, or a perfect legato."
The program begins with "God Save the King" - known in the United States as "America" - followed by Beethoven's variations on the theme.
There will be songs by Beethoven, Schubert and Alabiev, each followed by Franz Liszt's solo transcription.
"Then we're doing the opposite," Baron said - a group of vocal arrangements of Chopin mazurkas by Pauline Viardot-Garcia, a singer of Chopin's era and one of the composer's close friends.
With the ISO, she will perform Frederic Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor. Chen sees what’s often called a light orchestral accompaniment as a dialogue between soloist and ensemble.
“It’s sentimental, dramatic and operatic, and it’s, in many ways, like a conversation with a lot of musically folksy elements,” Chen says of the Polish composer’s work. See all stories on this topic
The PR department at Warsaw city council is thinking of throwing pianos out of windows as a public relations exercise to publicise the capital.
During the anti-Tsarist Uprising of 1863, Chopin’s piano was thrown out of the window of his sister’s apartment by the soldiers of the Tsar and smashed on the street below.
The PR Department in the Warsaw City council has come up with an idea of drawing on that historical episode in the promotion of Warsaw to tourists.
Vienna has its Mozart, London has its Sherlock Holmes, why not throw replicas of grand pianos out of the window as a promotion gimmick, Warsaw PR people say....
Preview and profile of pianist Konstantin Lifshitz, as a prelude to his April 10 performances and masterclasses in San Jose...
He's including the 12 Études of Chopin's Opus 25 in preparation for a week of master classes at Aix-en-Provence, and concludes the recital with Brahms' Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel. In between he's slipping in Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11, the composer's early, bracing venture into atonality. While he commits most of the music he performs to memory, he'll have the Schoenberg sheet music on hand. Lifschitz may be a genius, but he's not foolhardy.
Emanuel Ax comes to Steel City to play and share some thoughts about his "musical first love:"
Ax recalls that he began playing Chopin when he was 7 or 8. "I'm Polish by birth. All Polish pianists play Chopin, quite apart from him being a large part of every pianist's life, really.
"I certainly love Chopin as much as any composer. He was probably my first love in the sense that I also grew up with (Arthur) Rubinstein, who was known to me as 'the Chopin pianist.' He played a lot else marvelously, too."
Ax's family moved to Canada in 1959 and settled in New York City in 1961. After studying at the Juilliard School of Music and Columbia University, he began winning piano competitions. But his career really took off after winning first prize in the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in 1974.
"After I won, he was very kindly. When he came to New York several times a year, he always found a little time for me. We had a few lessons, among them the Chopin F minor Concerto. He had a lot of stuff to say, unbelievably exact and instructive. I got to have dinner with him a few times, too. I was moving in high circles," says the modest pianist.
Chopin and Debussy "are the most astonishingly original composers I know, Ax says. "With Beethoven, you see it's incredible music, but you can trace connections to Mozart and Haydn writing at the time. Chopin comes from Warsaw and explodes on the scene. It's a pretty revolutionary way of hearing music." See all stories on this topic
Shot at the world famous Pere-Lachaise cemetery, the largest in Paris, the film explores the thoughts and feelings of those who have come to the gravesites to pay tribute to famous people such as Chopin, Modigliani, Apollonaire, Balzac, Proust and Oscar Wilde as well as ordinary folk who lived and loved and have been remembered. It is a moving experience that engages both the mind and the heart.
The film opens with the story of pianist Yoshino Kimura, a young Asian woman who performs the work of Frederic Chopin as a means of connecting with her deceased father who loved his music. Scenes of Kimura playing the pensive melodies of Chopin's Nocturnes in concert are shown as the camera offers loving close ups of the pianist, the emotion revealed in her eyes.
Although she's only 20 years old, the Asian-American Kudo is a veteran of numerous international competitions. During the past three years alone, Kudo is the 2007 winner of the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, too second prize at the 2005 U.S. National Chopin and was the only American finalist at the 2005 Chopin Piano Competition in Poland. She has performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Fukui Symphony Orchestra and numerous other U.S. ensembles.
From the "Fly Funky Diva" blog, memories of a Miss America with some major Chopin mojo....
Marjorie's piano rendition of this Chopin masterpiece went down as one of the most brilliant talent performances in Miss America history. She also looked incredible! Marjorie Vincent was crowned Miss America this year making her the fourth african-american woman to hold the title.
Chinese pianist Xiayin Wang impresses at Carnegie's Zankel Hall...
Even for the most gifted young pianist, it takes a lot to be noticed. Xiayin Wang, a doctoral student at the Manhattan School of Music, is clearly doing something right. In her native China, where she trained at the Shanghai Conservatory, Ms. Wang took first place in numerous competitions. Since her arrival here in 1997, she has added further prizes to her tally, played Carnegie Hall several times and released a well-regarded recital CD. [...]
She offered a well-wrought account of Scriabin’s Fantasy in B minor, the work of a young, earnest Chopin acolyte. She found considerably more poetry in Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie in A flat, underscoring its affecting melancholy through the dreamy reverie of her opening bars and her beautifully flexible phrasing throughout.
Winner of the International Chopin Competition in 2000, Li offered the Polish composer's four Op. 33 Mazurkas. The perennial Mazurka in D major had the whirl of the ballroom, Li's firmly pointed left-hand adding a rustic edge to the dance rhythms.
Yet while polished and well played, considering this artist's reputation in Chopin his Mazurkas were a disappointment -- generalized and lacking the individual touch and subtle coloring to raise them above any number of well-drilled performances.
Li's Nocturne in E flat major was sensitively done with a hushed glowing coda and he showed his Lisztian bona fides in a steel-fingered account of Schumann's song Widmung.
Chopin's Andante Spianato proved more successful, the cascading notes as fresh and even as a flowing spring. The ensuing Grand Polonaise Brillant was a deft melding of bravura and elegance, with Li sailing through the tortuous complexities of the coda with impressive panache.
Thoughtful interview with the pianist enroute to her Savannah Music Festival debut, triggering memories of earlier visits to the USA...
A good friend of mine, a cellist and conductor, was at the Mayo clinic for cancer treatment. I went there to visit him after in 2005 after my recital at Carnegie Hall. They had three or four excellent grand pianos in the lobbies, and I played on every one of them. I particularly remember the moment when he and many of the other patients came downstairs to listen to me. They wanted to hear more and more. I played Chopin’s Nocturne, and I could see my friend’s tears.
He was a very bright person and he didn’t lose hope until the end, but I realized how much he really suffered. It was the last time I saw and could play for him. It wasn’t a concert but at moments like those it becomes clear that it is so important to share our love for music, and how beautiful what we do actually is.
Chopin provides the soundtrack to a Poltergeist Pursuit in Frisco...
When last I left off, I was about to enter a haunted room in the Queen Anne Hotel (see last week's Bouncer for part one of this column) after drinking at the Hotel Majestic. I went there with the San Francisco Ghost Society because the hotel is supposedly haunted by the ghost of Mary Lake.
[...]
You'd think I'd be freaking during all of this, but I wasn't that surprised. I believe in ghosts, after all. Mostly I just lay there and snoozed to the strains of Chopin.
From the Alternative Music Blog, a post-modern view of the music industry in Chopin's era..
I was talking with a young pianist the other day about composers like Paganini and Chopin, who tended to specialize on a particular instrument. Paganini was the business model for this era of composers and he took violin technique ‘where no man has gone before.’ He also wrote mostly violin pieces. No symphonies, not much chamber music; I can only think of a duet for violin and guitar. Ditto for Chopin, only for piano. I can only think of a ‘cello sonata and the rest was piano music,solo piano pieces long and short and piano concertos. I ventured my theory that this was due, in part, to the fact that the music business had already become extremely formatted....
Music and memories triggered by Fryderyk, and a classic video to boot....
There was the sound of Chopin’s Nocturne No.2 in E flat major from apartment B part of the house when I came home. It was a little choppy, but it didn’t stop me from falling back to the year of 2002, the year that I was frantically trying to apply for a college in the US. I was taking buses and trains all over the place to take exams like SAT or TOEFL, and on those trips I’d listen to a CD that has a collection of Chopin’s music. With the music playing I’d be thinking about something like, “wow I’m traveling,” or “I’m so far away from home I’m independent now,” or “I wonder if that boy is thinking of me now” stuff like this. art omelette - http://www.art-omelette.com/
Memories of a classic April 1 gag starring Chopin and the CBC...
Chopin perform the Minute Waltz in something like 68 seconds. This was more than the title called for, but rather less than the vast majority of pianists managed, as somebody hastily sent to the disk library for examples proved.
Over and again was the wonder that we listened to Chopin himself. And what did we think of that?
Then the canker worm raised its head. A listener called in to report that Bob might want to examine the mast head.
There it was: "Issue 0401." The rage for a lost penny wasn't in it.
A preview of a benefit concert by Dariusz Pawlas for Project Launch - a Texas-based organization that While the April concert centers on Autism, the overall target population of Project Launch includes children and adults with myriad conditions that significantly impair their ability to learn fully, encompassing those with ADD/ADHD; Dyslexia; Autism; Aspergers; Depression; Bipolar Disorder; Tourette’s Syndrome; Mental Retardation; Cerebral Palsy, etc.;
Now a teacher of piano at both Rice University and the University of Texas in Austin, Dr. Pawlas is famous for performing in Frederyk Chopin’s home at the Poland International Festival. Dr. Pawlas has performed in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Holland, Italy, and Chopin’s birthplace in Zelazowa Wola, as well as the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C. He is the winner of the prestigious Estrada Mlodych Polish Piano Festival and recipient of the Frederyk Chopin Society of Warsaw scholarship.
Dr. Pawlas was born in Poland in the Silesian city of Rybnik, where he began his musical studies at age five. He graduated with the highest honors from the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice, and Rice University in Houston. Earning recognition internationally for his extraordinary talent, Dr. Pawlas has played with the Silesian Philharmonic of Katowice and Artur Rubenstein Philharmonic in Lodz.
More praise for Emanuel Ax's performance of the Chopin Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Madison Symphony Orchestra....
But the heart of the MSO concert for me, a avowed piano fan, was Ax (whose picture by J. Henry Fairfax is at the top). The quicksilver fleetness of the notes, the delicacy of the articulation and lightness of the touch, the rich tone, the lyrical legato - it all made for an experience that was memorable and nothing short of extraordinary.
L.L. Flails in Fort Worth, to the dismay of a Dallas critic...
Subtlety isn't Mr. Lang's forte. With Liszt's chattering and booming octaves sometimes pounded within inches of the Steinway's life, with the simple little tune so pushed and pulled that it was sometimes barely identifiable as such, this was vulgarity in excelsis.
In the Chopin E major Etude, [Op. 10 No. 3] played as an encore, excessive rubato distorted the main tune, and the middle section was crudely banged. It sounded like a parody of Liszt parodying Chopin. See all stories on this topic
The main theme to this work, popularized as "No Other Love," and the one translated into "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows," are the two most well-known of Chopin's melodies. If you've never heard the lovely real thing, here it is. There was a time when I could play this thing, except for the middle part. Most avocational pianists will say the same thing.
Preview of the April 1 debut by our headline-grabbing pianist, who discusses his continuing connection to Chopin afer wininning the Chopin competition in Warsaw...
Yet Chopin will make up the bulk of Li's program, including four Mazurkas, the Nocturne in E flat major, and the Andante Spianato and Grand Polonaise Brillante.
The pianist's Chopin has a tonal elegance, detailing and subtlety that raise it above even the most accomplished of today's keyboard artists. His Chopin is well represented with two solo discs and the First Piano Concerto coupled with that of Liszt.
Artur Rubinstein, Sviatoslav Richter, and Martha Argerich -- three musicians with very distinct Chopin styles -- have all been key influences. Yet Li's probing and interior Chopin is very much his own, and he believes his approach to the Polish composer's music has evolved in the eight years since his victory in Warsaw.
''I was just 18,'' says Li. ``It was very exciting and after that, that really started my career.
``There's a big difference because of course I've been playing so many different pieces [since then]. Now, [his Chopin playing] is more developed and I feel it's deeper and more mature.''
For an artist whose performances display such intense control and concentration, Li prefers a spontaneous approach, rarely tackling a work the same way. ''I will play each piece slightly differently, because every concert gives me a different feeling,'' he says.
''But I especially enjoy Chopin's music,'' says Li. ``I think he will be one of the most interesting composers for my life.''
A couple of mostly inscrutable selections today, but since this blogs promises "All Things Chopin,"...follow link below for a short story called Shampoo ("Phrasing Chopin in Permanent Waves"). Meanwhile, over on Live Journal, our man Chopin is bound for the Krankenhaus, it seems...
Chopin Music of the Day: The "Autoharp" Etude: (Op. 10 No. 11 in E-flat)
Chopin Project concert series, Artistic Director Arthur Greene plays gives a performance of the tricky Etude in E-flat Major, Op. 10, No. 11, a piece that might have been inspired by the zithers (early autoharps) that Chopin heard in his Polish homeland...
