Absolute focus
Chopin Experience (BBC Radio 3)
You can almost hear the whispering through the ether. A whole weekend devoted to Chopin? Whatever was Roger Wright, Radio Three’s controller, thinking of? The Polish-born composer was only 39 when he died of TB in 1849. And he only ever really wrote for the piano. Surely there’s not enough music to fill 24 hours, let alone 48. His Preludes, Etudes, Barcarolles and Mazurkas are performed by every aspiring concert pianist, and rehashed for any promotion that demands a slushy, sentimental underscore. Do we really need a Radio Three Chopin Experience?
But Wright’s on a mission. His station is evolving away from a more rigid kind of scheduling to a broader blend of musical genres with some stunningly effective speech radio. Former fans of the station have complained bitterly about the reduction in the number of live performances, while the deletion of some of the more avant-garde programmes such as Mixing It have led to suggestions that the station is trying to be more populist. But sometimes surprising meanings, new understandings can be found through absolute focus. Chopin and nothing else. It’s like Yves Klein using only one colour to explore the meaning of blue, or Alice Munro distilling her craft by writing only short stories. Such a narrow range creates quite different insights by virtue of its concentration. Chopin and nothing else might have turned off those with a confirmed dislike of his particular musical language, but those who stuck with it will have benefited from a weekend masterclass on how to listen to music from some of the best minds in the business.
One of the advantages of there not being quite enough music to fill the hours was that there were lots of documentary features with a Chopin flavour, putting the music in context and deepening our understanding of the work. On The Early Music Show (Saturday), Catherine Bott went in search of the pianos Chopin had played while on his visits to London in 1847 and 1848. The Pleyel which he brought with him to London is now in the Cobbe collection of instruments at Hatchlands in Surrey. It was actually an old-fashioned instrument, Bott explained, but Chopin preferred its lighter sound to the more modern concert grands. Unlike Liszt, he didn’t play in public and so didn’t need to reach the cheap seats at the back of a large concert hall.
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Paul Potts
May 25th, 2008 10:00amOf course Chopin played in public, certainly in Paris, where he complained that he really wanted to play Scarlatti, but was afraid people would laugh at him. For sure, Liszt never played Scarlatti - it sounds too easy. I am afraid that the history of music is loaded with such half-misunderstood gossip, peddled of course by the BBC and now in the
Spectator. Was it really TB Chopin died of? Well, everybody else did, so why not? There is so much of this guesswork as fact around, as concerns Mozart and his death, and the Mannheim orchestra etc; Beethoven and his deafness etc, that there is enough for another Spectator.
You are right to pick up on Chopin as a talker. Not only in the Nocturnes, but everywhere, including the Walzes, where the dance somehow forms a background to an amusing or amorous conversation. By the way, to play Chopin you have to think and feel with your fingers, pace Boulanger and Barenboim. Mozart and Schubert were singers, Beethoven a dancer, Chopin and Scarlatti (and Elgar) were talkers. Where the others fit in might form yet another article. I'll try if invited.