With Sarah Walker. Including Sarah's Essential Choice: Falla: El amor brujo. 
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Maurizio Pollini
Maurizio Pollini won the Warsaw Piano Competition as a teenager fifty years ago in1960. So spectacular was his success that he became almost completely identified with the composer and went on to make some of the most famous Chopin recordings ever.
He talks to Tom about his priorities in playing Chopin today, and the emotional core and inner life of the music.
Photo: copyright Mathias Bothor/DG -
Krystian Zimerman
Krystian Zimerman won the Chopin Competition fifteen years after Pollini in 1975, and the composer has been at the heart of his career ever since. But Zimerman’s relationship with Chopin is as rich as it is complex: Chopin was forced to live in exile, but Zimerman has chosen to live away from his Polish homeland.
He tells Tom that the question of Chopin’s nationality didn’t engage him until, like Fryderyk, he began to feel more Polish himself the longer he lived away from his home country. He also talks about the pieces that he thinks are Chopin at his greatest, and how this music is so powerful that it turns its performers and its listeners into victims of its mysterious force.
Photo: copyright Hiromichi Yamamoto/DG -
Playing Chopin
Putting Zimerman and Pollini in context, pianist and scholar Kenneth Hamilton explains how traditions of playing Chopin have changed over the last century and a half. As soon as Chopin died, pianists started claiming him as their own, using his music as the basis of their interpretations and creating a performance style that differs greatly from todays. At the piano Kenneth shows Tom how they did it…
And now open at the British Library is a new exhibition titled ‘Chopin: The Romantic Refugee’. Amongst its many prized and precious exhibits are six original manuscripts in Chopin's hand, two portraits of the composer being shown in public for the first time, Chopin’s death mask, and a plaster cast of his left hand.
Tom is shown round the exhibition by curator Nicolas Bell and Chopin biographer Adam Zamoyski.
You can see some of the exhibits from the British Library below. -
Chopin’s ‘Revolutionary Étude’
Chopin’s 12 Études op.10 take the outward form of technical exercises, each designed to improve a particular type of figuration or articulation. Chopin transformed this didactic genre into a vehicle for some of the most lyrical and refined works of his early years. The Études (or studies) were composed between 1829 and 1832 and published in 1833 with a dedication to Franz Liszt, who had lived in Paris since 1823. This last study is by far the most impassioned of the set and is said to have been composed as a reaction to the tragic news of the fall of Warsaw in September 1831. Courtesy of British Library Board.
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A plaster cast of Chopin's left hand
Courtesy of the Royal College of Music
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Chopin's famous 'Barcarolle'
The original manuscript of the famous Barcarolle, one of Chopin’s last substantial pieces. He laboured over this piece for many weeks in 1845. Chopin gave his only public performance of the work in a concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on 16 February 1848, six days before revolution broke out in Paris. A few weeks later he escaped to London. Courtesy of the British Library Board.
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Portrait of Chopin by Teofil Kwiatkowski
Kwiatkowski was the leading artist of the Polish émigré community in Paris, and produced many paintings for the Czartoryskis and other members of the Hôtel Lambert. Although he specialised in landscapes, he is best known today for his numerous depictions of Chopin. This watercolour showing the composer in a Romantic pose was first executed in 1843. Kwiatkowski made several further copies of the painting after Chopin’s death, to serve as mementos for Chopin’s pupils and admirers. On loan from the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, Warsaw.
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Programme for a concert Chopin gave the year before his death
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Zamoyska Miniature
This is a previously unknown 19th-century photograph of a portrait, now lost, which Chopin gave to Countess Anna Zamoyska when she was his pupil in Paris in the years 1838–40. The picture probably dates from a few years earlier, when Chopin was in his early twenties.
Broadcasts
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BBC Radio 3Sat 13 Mar 2010 12:15 BBC Radio 3
Podcast
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Music Matters
The latest news on classical music. Interviews with key UK and international performers, composers,...
