Chopin is a difficult composer to celebrate, at least in the festivals of larger format. Countless piano recitals don’t really fit the bill and the music which includes orchestra is not the best of him. He surely was a miniaturist — perhaps the most compelling there has ever been. Which other composer can set a mood so securely in the very first bar, and then sustain it as a single shaft of thought to the end? He is like a painter who with three strokes of the brush has told you all you need to know about what is to follow, so that what does follow already seems like a familiar and longed-for friend.
Of course this kind of writing doesn’t work very well in a building the size of the Albert Hall. The Proms could have staged a mini-Chopin festival in their second venue, Cadogan Hall, but in fact only two of their concerts have featured his music, both of them in the Albert Hall and one of them featuring the inevitable Second Piano Concerto. This piano concerto has shown itself to be a convenient halfway house for festivals which want both Chopin and an orchestral concert, and I imagine this single, unrepresentative work will be the most performed of all. It cropped up again at the Edinburgh Festival on 17 August in a rarely heard chamber music version, played by Melvyn Tan and Škampa. Otherwise this festival also relegated Chopin to one or two items in more general programmes. The person who seems to have done the most for Chopin this summer is the pianist Joanna MacGregor, both in her planning for the Bath Festival last May (‘Chopin, Poet of the Piano’) and in her own recitals. An example of the latter will take place on 14 September at Brunel University, when she will explore the Mazurkas.
Such half-heartedness and general barrel-scraping is not the way the Poles are going about their hero’s anniversary. The ‘Chopin and his Europe’ festival in Warsaw has been running for the whole of the month of August, presenting 55 concerts, every one of which containing music by the master. Well, almost. Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis was performed by Philippe Herreweghe in an orchestration which Chopin would have recognised (as Eddie Izzard once said of Gerry Dorsey when he hit on the name Engelbert Humperdinck, I would love to have been a fly on the wall when that one was worked through); and Chopin’s experience of opera apparently ran to Meyerbeer and Rossini. Otherwise it is the genuine article all the way.
Chopin is clearly good for the Poles: I’ve rarely been to an international festival which has generated so much straightforward joy. Their addiction to him — ironic, one might say, since he was half-French and spent most of his life in France — is a form of nationalism, stemming from their innate love of music and a shortage of other candidates. The Tallis Scholars recently gave a concert of completely unknown renaissance Polish composers in the royal castle in Kraków, which caused a proper media stir. Journalists, students and academics alike were desperate for us to think that this was really good music; and so keen are they to find a Polish Palestrina or Monteverdi that when, for a dare, I announced (on the radio) that the eight-voice Crucifixus of Antonio Lotti was by Antonio Zloty, one earnest listener insisted on seeing a copy of the music, in case I had found a Polish composer no one knew about.
We landed at the Chopin terminal of Warsaw International airport; wore Chopin pendants round our necks at the festivities which bore his name; were employed by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute; and drank Chopin vodka before dinner. And then there was a specially commissioned piece, by Paweł Mykietyn, for us to sing. We were told in advance that it would contain themes from Chopin, woven into the texture of the music. I imagined a polyphonic motet in some kind of modern idiom, cleverly disguising these you have loved and necessitating an erudite guessing game. What we got was 20 pages of note clusters, culminating on a whispered middle C. Any connection with Chopin had long been assumed spurious, until we noticed the festival director roaring with laughter in the front row of the audience. Apparently the whole thing was an elaborate joke, centred on the fact that the note clusters had been derived from the harmonies which underlie Chopin’s Berceuse. No one thought to tell us this, as we clung on for dear life. I’m glad our performance gave pleasure — and I wish them well with Antonio Zloty.
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