http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d6324182-38da-11dd-8aed-0000779fd2ac.html The Financial Times Reasons we need Chopin By Harry Eyres [[log in to unmask]] Published: June 14 2008 01:31 The other weekend BBC Radio 3 held a Chopin jamboree -- two days entirely devoted to Poland's great poet of the piano. There was no particular reason, as far as I could see: no major anniversary, no topical peg; it just seemed a good idea. And so it was; in our household we listened entranced, to a succession of wonderful performances and illuminating live comments by musicians of the calibre of Vladimir Ashkenazy and Tamas Vasary. As Sunday evening approached, the normal end-of-holiday blues were intensified: we wished Chopin Weekend would carry on for days. Listening to a lot of Chopin felt different from being immersed in Bach or Beethoven or Bruckner. There was nothing over-reverent about this experience; Chopin strikes me as one of the least religious musicians, in the conventional sense, who has ever lived. There was much sheer delight and exuberance: the hyper-sensitive, consumptive composer, so unhappy in love, also wrote some of the most purely delicious music ever confected -- the two early piano concertos, the more extravert waltzes, the Berceuse and the impromptus. But talk of confectionery doesn't quite explain the appeal of Chopin. When asked what it was that drew him to the music of his fellow Pole, the great Chopin pianist Arthur Rubinstein replied: "I don't know, Chopin just spoke to me." Presumably Chopin speaks to very many of us: his voice seems like an essence of humanity. For that reason his pieces continue to be the most played and programmed in the piano repertoire, all over the world, from Taiwan to Tennessee. One objection to Chopin Weekend could have been simply that Chopin is too well-known, one composer in no danger whatsoever of being neglected. But what was revealed, I felt, was just how little we really know about Chopin -- how ultimately unknowable he, like all great artists, remains. How well, for instance, do we know the Funeral March sonata (apart from the da-da-di-dum tune which opens the slow movement)? This was where Chopin Weekend began, with a fascinating comparison, in that cynosure of classical music programmes Building a Library, of all the available recordings of Chopin's opus 35 in B flat minor. Here is an uncompromising, revolutionary piece if ever there was one. From the strange, violent, truncated introduction to the whispering, desolate, tuneless finale, this supposedly familiar work plunges us into the most uncomfortable extremes of emotion: a travel agent advertising this kind of emotional journey, from agony, though death, to desolation, would go out of business in a matter of hours. Another revelation was that no one has yet been able to play the piece entirely satisfactorily. Some of the greatest pianists who have ever lived (Rachmaninov, Cortot, Rubinstein, Horowitz) failed to deliver technically flawless accounts, especially of the fiendish Scherzo, while the experience of listening to a "VorsprungdurchTechnik" Wunderkind such as Evgeny Kissin was described by Harriet Smith as "no more enjoyable than facing a firing squad". Play safe with this music and you may hit all the notes but you will miss the essence; much better to take risks, like Rachmaninov and Rubinstein. The final movement still sounds modern and eerie and challenging, closer to late Beckett than Lord Byron: a chill blast from some region we would rather not visit, certainly not often. In fact I was left wondering when I would have the courage to face this music again. Now we are getting closer to what makes Chopin great: a combination of that human vulnerability and those challenging extremes. He draws us in, by speaking in the most human of tones, then challenges us to extend the range of the human, or our range. For many musicians, Chopin's greatest work is the 24 Preludes opus 28. Here you find the coming-together of extreme concision with grand scope. Some of the preludes last less than a minute; even the longest, the so-called Raindrop Prelude, lasts no longer than five. Each is a miniature world, and their juxtaposition creates a kaleidoscope that sets out a new philosophy of human emotion: we are not sensible smiling 18th-century rationalists, but unstable successions of the most violently conflicting moods, from the playful delight of the 23rd Prelude to the epic despair of the 24th. We contradict ourselves, as Whitman would later confirm; sometimes we may be incomprehensible to ourselves. One of the shortest and apparently simplest of all the Preludes is number 7 in A major. A young pianist who has reached Grade 5 can master this one -- master the notes, that is. But I have found it takes half a lifetime (I started playing this piece 37 years ago) to begin to understand what lies behind the notes. Wordsworth's comment about "emotion recollected in tranquillity" provides a key. There is a certain distance between the emotion and the expression; if you like, a love idyll in the past, recalled not with bitterness, but with heart-breaking tenderness. Getting the shading of tone right here challenges not just your technique but every fibre of your imagination and humanity. This is why we need Chopin: to cleanse our emotional and existential filters of all the gunge that keeps clogging up our lives. Janos Gereben www.sfcv.org [log in to unmask] *********************************************** The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html