Music 2 - Dermot Clinch hears Chopin appraised and played
To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the death of Frederic Chopin, the South Bank Centre hosted a "Chopin Forum". The top Chopin bananas came. Dr Eigeldinger of Geneva entertained us with anecdotes of the composer taking 10 per cent commissions on the sale to his friends of pianos made by Monsieur Pleyel. Dr Rink of London discussed editions and recommended his own (Peters, in the press). Dr Kallberg of Philadelphia suggested we would feel differently about the composer if he had died "aged 80 during his morning workout" rather than 39 surrounded by scented autumn flowers and his own presumably blood-flecked sputum.
There were four pianos on stage. Three were old, such as the composer might have played; one was new, such as he didn't but these days people generally do. The pianist Mitsuko Uchida darted between them and argued vocally with the restorer of the old ones, who was in the audience, about precisely how many grams' resistance - 20? 25? - their keyboards offered to her fingers.
Later Professor Charles Rosen demonstrated his extraordinary musical facility by plumping down at whichever one took his fancy to illustrate from memory whichever point he was making, while at the same time puncturing the pretension of playing music on instruments of the composer's day at all. Would it not make more sense to play a composer's music on a piano of a later date, one inspired by the possibilities the earlier music opened up? Beethoven on Liszt's piano, Liszt on Brahms' piano, Brahms on a Steinway . . . ?
Rosen scattered erudite sedition. "You can give a great performance from a bad edition," he noted, with perhaps a glance at the proudly editorial Rink. "My piano teacher, Moriz Rosenthal, who studied with X, who studied with Chopin, played it this way . . . Richter played Schubert's B flat sonata too slow, but it's a lot better than many at the correct tempo." Rosen's book The Romantic Generation has done more than anything in the past decade to make Chopin, and Schumann, and others, thoroughly respectable. With pride he described himself as a parasite on the scholarship of the others present.
Where Rosen states that Mozart was the greatest master of counterpoint after Bach, and Chopin the greatest master after Mozart, we feel disinclined to disagree. Chopin is a certified great. The Victorian musicologist who found that "the want of manliness, moral and intellectual, marks the one great limitation of Chopin's province" gets, these days, the thumbs down, and we are more likely to concur with Debussy, who considered Chopin the greatest of them all, "for through the piano alone he discovered everything". A Chopin Ballade is as long as a Beethoven sonata movement and as structurally innovative; a short, late mazurka plays academic games as witty and affecting as a Beethoven bagatelle; the last pages of the Barcarolle have a grandeur that is - said Rosen as he played them - positively Wagnerian.
Mitsuko Uchida initiated the Festival Hall's Chopin recital series on the day of the death. Her programme was designed to demonstrate in sound what the academics had told us: that Chopin's true companions are his twin gods, Bach and Mozart. She played Debussy Etudes along with some of Chopin's and reminded us, incidentally, of the control of voice and texture she brings, dependably, to the masterpieces of the canon.
But the event of the week had to be the arrival, on a long anniversary tribute tour, of the Polish pianist, Krystian Zimerman, playing and simultaneously conducting Chopin's two piano concertos with his Polish Festival Orchestra. The works have been maligned. But Zimerman disagrees and founded an orchestra to make his points. He auditioned the players, rehearsed them, conducted them; he has checked the menus in their hotels to keep their spirits up. And from the balance of an orchestral chord to the bowing of a sliding cello portamento - the latter an unconventional effect in itself - the musical detail has been attended to with as much care.
Everything Zimerman did was sanctioned by Chopin's own practice. But the performance was strange enough, at first, as to be almost rebarbative. Rhetorical points were made by slowing entire sections to half speed; an opening tutti became a battle between the resolute, martial, mascul-ine and the soft, yielding, feminine; the Second Concerto's Romance became an operatic scena with the bassoon taking the male lead; climactic chords in the First Concerto were invested with a force rarely heard outside Beethoven. The performances have been recorded for Deutsche Grammophon. The orchestral reading is the most challenging, the piano performance the most sympathetic and apparently effortless in recent years. The shock wears off, to be replaced by mere admiring disbelief.
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