Chopin
I do believe that Chopin just might be my favorite composer. I fixed on him when I was still a very young child, because he was the most-played composer to accompany my ballet classes. I didn’t even know his name at the time, but after so much repetition I knew many of his pieces inside out. Much later, I bought a multiple-record set of his entire works. And the other day I discovered that you can get a similar digital collection from Amazon for ninety-nine cents.
Yes, you can. Ninety-nine cents, total.
Chopin’s sound is sui generis. To me, he’s instantly recognizable, never predictable, always beautiful. I hadn’t known till I looked him up that he was also a virtuoso pianist and a child prodigy.
Here’s one of my many many favorite works of Chopin. How old do you think he was when he composed it? (don’t read the blurb at YouTube or scroll down here yet, because it reveals the answer):
The answer: Chopin wrote that little number at the age of seven. It’s not just that it’s beautiful, it’s that it’s remarkably sophisticated. I don’t know about you, but I think that even in the realm of the child prodigy, that achievement is prodigious. And the piece already has that signature Chopin sound.
Here is a performance that, fittingly, is by an eight-year-old. It’s not as good as the one above, but it’s pretty extraordinary. Prodigies are remarkable:
As a boy, I spent many hours listening to Chopin’s piano music. on vinyl records (33 rpm and 78 rpm), and I can see why he might be your favourite composer. There have been more than a few great interpreters of his music, and my personal favourite is Alfred Cortot who was at his peak in the early 20th century. He was famous for playing more wrong notes than any other pianist and for his memory lapses, but some consider him to be one of the finest interpreters of Chopin.
Your favorite and mine also. If you try to put your finger on what makes Chopin, Chopin the striking lyricism which Webster’s defines as an intense personal quality expressive of feeling or emotion in an art stands out. His music seems to reach into your soul. A big part of it is the primacy of melody. He takes a percussive instrument, the piano, and makes it sing. Everything from ornamentation to harmony is put at the service of melody. Not that he didn’t use rhythmic percussion and dissonance also. He was a master of the instrument.
But does Trump like Chopin?
Johann Nepomuk Hummel was an earlier composer/pianist with some of the Chopin sound. I remember listening to one of his piano concertos and being surprised at how much the piano sounded like Chopin.
everyone (in the know) has their favorite version of Frédéric Chopin’s Heroic Polonaise, i like the one with lyrics… heh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ1yPz14LrU
Much like Van Morrison, Chopin had a problem performing… (van morrison was originally a window washer ergo his song about that, but he is well known in the industry to not like to face people. if you notice when he sings he often turns his back to the audience, and even his agent rarerly gets to speak to him face to face… ) – which is why chopin liked to perform in small parlors, not large halls.
he also had a strange habit of only shaving half his face… because the audience would not see the other side.
the professional wrestler the undertaker uses a heavy metal version of funeral march sonata #2 as his entrance music…
[at least its not the worn out bach tocata and fugue – or the source of much beatles music, including eleanor rigby, kodais peacock variations]
he HATED the minute waltz as a name for his work, being a perfetionist he would work up to six days on one page… so he disliked others rushing through his minute waltz… (which he would have been horrified by 4′33″ by john cage… a definite downer to pay to not hear… 🙂 )
@Llwddythlw Guiomar Novaes is another pianist from that period who was a remarkable interpreter of Chopin.
No better evidence and argument can be made for why life’s inequality of blessings are not only an absolute necessity but an inestimable blessing.
Could there be a greater irony than the left’s obsession with denying life’s essential inequality of blessings and, its equal obsession with evolution; the ultimate inequality, where beneficial mutations are ‘unfairly’ passed on to one’s descendants and denied to everyone else?
Were it not for ‘unfair’ individual genius, the human race would still be living in caves and life would still be “nasty, brutish and short”.
Prodigies are remarkable.
Well, yes. Practically by definition. Prodigies don’t grow on trees.
Chopin’s piano music seems to me the jazziest of the classical piano repertoire.
I looked at the video of the 8-year old pianist and wondered how he could play a piece so well considering that his hands weren’t big enough to play the octave-long finger stretches in such pieces. Then I read up and discovered that Chopin had composed the piece when he was 7 years old. Good idea to read the whole article first.
Dodger: hilarious.
For many decades there has been inequity in the price of entertainment and its quality. I’m not surprised you can get Chopin’s Opi (Opuses?) so cheaply.
We live in an era when people will pay $500 to watch 4, 70-year old men hobble around a stage screeching 100 yards away when less than $100 will get you a seat within spitting distance of any number of world class orchestras consisting of dozens of highly trained musicians performing the greatest muslcal works ever composed.
People will pay $1,000 to watch a 60 minute athletic contest while most cities can’t even fund 1 orchestra, ballet or opera house.
People will pay hundreds of dollars for a collector’s edition blu-ray DVD set of the abysmal, cartoonishly written and acted Star Wars films but never access the works of William Shakespeare, available for free on a device they carry in their pocket or purse.
Artists used to work for a higher purpose, to elevate humanity and bring us closer to God.
Today artists work for fame, trying to elevate themselves to the level of a god.
My classical tastes are not mature enough to apprecaite the Romantics. I don’t dislike their music, but I get more pleasure from the earlier Classical and Baroque periods.
My cousing graduated from Juliard and did his recital at lincoln centers Alice Tully Hall… when i was 13, i did mine at Avery Fischer Hall (as first string soloist clarinet – and i did not go to juliard).
i have copious amouts of music memorized note for note as part of that memory thing i do… so i got bored… (though i do remember the first time i did a solo… i had never seen the marks on the page before, and i thought the blank area was a pause… the conductor informed me that i was to fill in that blank area with whatevr came to mind, just make sure that when i got to the end of that, whatever i did was to be resolved to the rest of the music. so in this case a solo was a excursion of whimsey that had to musically fit by its end into the rest… hard to do on the fly… )
i played mozart, and even fun tv tunes… and othres.. brahms, schubert, bach, bethoven, and on and on…
then boredome took me to Kodé¡ly peacock variations
[sorry i mispelled it in the last post]
if you listen, you can hear the parts kind of stolen to make many beatles tunes… [my memory allows me to notice when music matches other music even if obscure]
and it bounces back
Al di Meola plays Beatles and more — Kodé¡ly Ké¶zpont
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GHKa3JMaUw
Kodé¡ly method
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kod%C3%A1ly_method
anyway… i started to really enjoy mashups…
and my favorite mashup, is not billy joel doing classical (of which he is very good as he is with rock and roll, and of course, not respected the same way that commercial artists are not liked by fine artists)..
was a Classic Case…
A Classic Case (1985) is an album by Jethro Tull, playing with the London Symphony Orchestra, released in 1985. The music was arranged and conducted by David Palmer. The album features band members Ian Anderson, Martin Barre, Dave Pegg and Peter-John Vettese.
there are several pieces that turned out to be exceptional, and one piece has a guitar rift that puts rock and roll guitarists to shame… (you can see it played if you look hard enough by a classical electric guitarist… he almost doesnt move, but his fingers fly)
i love how Bourrée turned out.. (dance music)
if you go here, you can here how its supposed to be
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourr%C3%A9e
and here is the group jethro tull (the group is named after a famous lawyer)
Jethro Tull – Bourée
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2RNe2jwHE0
[ian andersons flute playing is very stylistic… he uses overblow the way a guitarist may use feedback… however, if you listen to the earliest versions, compared to later, you can actually hear him humming as he plays… ]
and then back to classic, as the old version goes to tull as rock, then the arrangement is taken up by the london symphony
Jethro Tull – A Classic Case (1985) 04. Bourée
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFF8R_6FHwY
[the flute playing is nice…compared to earlier versions]
[edited for length by n-n]
Well b***er me, I thought I’d heard of almost every famous living pianist, but not Guiomar Novaes. I found on Youtube performances of Chopin’s nocturne in E flat major opus 9 no. 2, by Cortot (many years ago this was my first experience of Cortot) and a performance by Novaes so I was able to make a comparison. She has a nice delicate touch but then so did Cortot. Her rhythm is far more even while Cortot seems to stick in a rubato at every opportunity. On the whole, I prefer Cortot’s performance but de gustibus non est disputandum.
Here’s an interesting article about playing Chopin from The New York Times, a former newspaper (to quote Andrew Klavan).
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/12/arts/classical-view-how-to-play-chopin-cortot-had-answers.html
> Her rhythm is far more even
She came on the scene somewhat later. Even so, I think she was famous for precision of rhythm. I listened her recording of the E minor concerto while following the piano score and even in the most intense and dramatic passages every d*mn note got its precise value. It was sort of mind boggling.
A less performed piece that he composed at 18 is the Rondo “Krakiowak” here played by Claudio Arrau with the London Philharmonic. Joyous and uplifting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOyTFZ3gkVY
Feast on this, then: Arthur Rubinstein teaching the Ballade in G Minor (my favorite Chopin, especially as played by Rubinstein) in a master class:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlBmdNm3uhc
Here is the master’s rendition, recorded in 1959:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6VxVmt6UOA
He made a point of not overdubbing mistakes: he wanted his performances whole.
I have a plebian taste in Chopin; I like what I like, I can tell when it is overdone, but have no ability to say how one is better than the other really. Valdimir Ashkenazy always seems about right to me in his interpretations. Here is his Ballade in G version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXZ70ykfDn0
And thank you Neo for posting something of lasting cultural value to cleanse the continuing bad taste of Trump. Long after this current political disaster is a historical footnote, Chopin will be quite relevant. Or so I pray.
@bdh “Long after this current political disaster is a historical footnote, Chopin will be quite relevant. Or so I pray.”
…from your words to G-d’s ears.
Beverly, Rubinstein’s ’59 recording of the G minor Ballade is exquisite! My usual reaction to his playing is to notice his economy in the use of pedal but at the same time relish the clarity. With this recording the balance is perfect.
Here’s an old recording of Vladimir de Pachmann, the “Chopinzee” and great eccentric playing the minute waltz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STPrWpl3UZo
The classical piece that moves my soul like no other is Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade”, especially the 1958 Fritz Reiner – Chicago Symphony Orchestra version on RCA Victor’s “Living Stereo”.
I know that many classical music aficionados are at best lukewarm to it. But for me no other music even comes close. Like Martin Luther, “Here I stand, I can do no other”
Llwddythlw, de Pachmann took more than a few liberties. (Sounds like my playing, late at night after too many drinks.) Horowitz did the same, but never to that extreme. Genius is allowed, ah, certain latitude.