Great Concertos - Chopin Booklet · By contrast, in Op. 11’s finale, the orchestra solemnly...

CHOPINPIANO CONCERTO NO. 1PIANO CONCERTO NO. 2

THE GREAT CONCERTOS

EWA KUPIEC

TASMANIAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA • LANG-LESSING

MELBOURNE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA • SEAMAN

Great Concertos - Chopin Booklet 22/02/12 11:18 AM

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FRÉDÉRIC (FRYDERYK) CHOPIN 1810-1849

Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21 (1829) [33’57]1 I. Maestoso 15’002 II. Larghetto 10’023 III. Allegro vivace 8’46

Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Sebastian Lang-Lessing conductor

Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11 (1830) [39’28]4 I. Allegro maestoso 19’575 II. Romanze (Larghetto) 9’316 III. Rondo (Vivace) 9’53

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Christopher Seaman conductor LIVE RECORDING

Total Playing Time 73’40Ewa Kupiec piano


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Chopin knew from very early in adult life that the career of piano virtuoso was not for him. According tohis friend, colleague and rival Franz Liszt, Chopin was ‘repelled by the furious and frenzied face ofRomanticism’. Where Liszt’s career traces a magnificent arc from prodigy through virt uoso todistinguished composer of large-scale works, Chopin’s seems a story of withdrawal from the concertplatform and even from metropolitan society. But the cliché of him retreating into miniatures isinaccurate. Not only do the solo works in the genres that he made his o wn, such as the nocturne,ballade, polonaise and mazurka, often take on a substantial scale and an amazing intricacy, but Chopinremained interested enough in ‘classical’ forms to complete his Third Sonata as late as 1844.

It is true, though, that after he left Poland in 1830, his piano music became ever more subtle – moresuited to the salon than the concert hall – and he wrote virt ually no music involving any otherinstruments. The pieces for piano and orchestra, including the two concertos, were, with oneexception, the work of the late-teenaged composer in his nativ e Warsaw.

There are three major works for piano and orchestra that predate the concertos. In 1828 Chopincomposed the Variations on Polish National Themes, Op. 13 and the Rondo à la Krakowiak, Op. 14 – the latter based on a popular dance form from the Cracow region. Both, therefore, reflect Chopin’searly interest in Polish demotic music, which had been cultivated by his composition teacher, JózefElsner, and hailed by critics as expressing ‘the Polish soul’. In the previous year Chopin had composedhis Variations on ‘Là ci darem la mano’ from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Op. 2, the work that promptedRobert Schumann’s famous review, with its conclusion: ‘Hats off, gentlemen. A genius!’

During and immediately after his student years, Chopin had travelled to Berlin and Vienna; in 1829 thelatter city saw a performance of the Krakowiak Rondo and fêted the young pianist-composer. Returningto Warsaw, Chopin found himself at a loss. His dearest friend, Tytus Woyciechowski, had left for thecountryside, and, moreover, he had conceived a passion for an aspiring young singer, KonstancjaGladowska – or at least so he said in the w armly passionate letters he wrote to Tytus.

Some of this passion was sublimated in the Concerto in F minor, Op. 21 – written in 1829, before Op. 11,but published after. In a letter to Tytus, quoted by Camille Bourniquel, Chopin wrote of Konstancja:

To my misfortune, perhaps, I have found my ideal. I venerate her with all my soul. For six months I have been dreaming of her every night, and still I have not addressed a single word to her. It isthinking of her that I have composed the Adagio of my concerto…

The Adagio – or Larghetto as it was ultimately marked – has been described as Chopin’s ‘firstNocturne’, and the influence of the Irish composer J ohn Field, who inaugurated the genre, is clearly f elt


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in the piano writing in this movement. Field’s innovation was to treat the melody of a w ork for solopiano as if it were the vocal line in a bel canto aria, almost seemingly independent of the simpleaccompaniment, and richly decorated with various ornamental figures. As Kornel Michałowski and JimSamson have noted, too, the ‘tendency to sweeten the melody with parallel thirds and sixths isstrongly reminiscent of operatic duet textures.’ Chopin’s innovation, in his solo music especially, was tointroduce a polyphonic complexity to this simple texture without destroying its effect.

Chopin famously criticised the music of Beethoven, saying it is occasionally ‘obscure and seems lackingin unity… The reason is that he turns his back on eternal principles; Mozart never.’ It would be wrong,however, to imagine that in writing his t wo concertos, Chopin used Mozart’s as a model. CharlesRosen has argued that ‘as a student, Chopin knew the solo works of Mozart, but probably none of theconcertos: his idea of the concerto form came from Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Frédéric Kalkbrenner,and John Field,’ and it was to Kalkbrenner that he dedicated the E minor Concerto.

Elsner, who taught Chopin and who is widely regarded as the f ather of Polish music, studied in Viennafrom 1789, by which time Mozart’s energies had shifted from concerto to opera, and by the 1820s, ofcourse, even Beethoven’s concertos were in eclipse. The genre was dominated by those composers,like Hummel, who cultivated what is sometimes known as the style brillant – a post-Classical, ratherthan Romantic, manner that stresses glittering virtuosity. This is not to say that works such as Chopin’sare careless with, or ignorant of, Classical form. Following Elsner’s lead, Chopin’s concertos tend tofocus the biggest contrasts of key – which are the basis for Classical music’s abstract drama – in thelatter movements of the works. The form of the first movement, in both concertos, is generated out of the emotional contrast of themes rather than their tonal relationships. This is a departure from the‘rules’ of Classical sonata design, but maintains its spirit in the tension bet ween assertive andreflective passages.

Both first movements begin with a substantial orchestral exposition of their themes. The F minorConcerto, dedicated to Countess Delfina Potocka, has a turbulent, duple metre opening, full of‘Baroque’ dotted rhythms, set off against calmer chordal writing that is interrupted by the imperiousentry of the piano. The E minor Concerto, more unusually, opens with a movement in triple metre thatanticipates some of Schumann’s symphonic writing and which builds to a climactic fanfare for fullorchestra. After a quieter reprise of the opening the piano, again, enters with an ar resting gesture.

Chopin’s infatuation with Konstancja Gladowska may also lie behind the slow movement, markedRomanze: Larghetto, of the E minor work composed in 1830. Writing to Tytus, Chopin explained that this movement:


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is not supposed to be strong , but romantic, soft, calm, melancholy; it should give the impression of gazing at a spot which brings back a thousand memories. It should be lik e dreaming in beautifulspringtime – by moonlight.

This would be one of the few times Chopin indulged in any such explication of his music. Nonetheless,that the concertos continue his assertion of Polishness, in the face of growing tensions with Russia, is clear in the finales. The F minor Concerto, which begins in duple metre, closes with a mo vementdominated by the lively triple-metre of the mazurka (introduced by the solo piano, rather than theorchestra). By contrast, in Op. 11’s finale, the orchestra solemnly introduces the piano playing asparkling 2/4 krakowiak that it elaborates in ever more brilliant ways throughout.

Chopin ‘premiered’ both works in concerts in private houses (though Op. 21 was reviewed in the pressby a critic who happily proclaimed the composer a genius), in both cases accompanied b y a smallscratch orchestra; there are also versions of the works as two-piano or piano and string quartet scores.The first public performances were triumphs, even if the piano on the first occasion f or Op. 21 wasunderpowered. But after a less successful performance in Paris some years later, Chopin wrote to Lisztthat he was ‘not fit to give concerts; the crowd intimidates me and I feel asphyxiated by its eagerbreath, paralysed by its inquisitive stare, silenced by its alien faces.’

Sadly there exists no autograph score of Op. 11, and that of Op. 21 has only the piano part in Chopin ’shand, with the orchestral parts written in by an amanuensis. Nevertheless, both were published duringChopin’s lifetime so we can assume he took responsibility for the scoring. This has been generallyregarded as less engaging than the orchestration of the earlier works with orchestra, and has temptednumerous people to ‘improve’ the scores – and to make the piano parts more ‘Lisztian’. On the basis ofone such, George Bernard Shaw noted that the early death of the ar ranger, pianist Carl Tausig, was ‘likethat of Ananias, the result of supernatural interposition for the extermination of a sacrilegious meddler.’ Inthe published scores there are no egregious er rors, and some beautiful moments like the full tutti in thefirst movement of Op. 11, or the bassoon solo in the Romanze. But as Charles Rosen has pointed out:

To accompany another pianist with a reduction for a second piano of the orchestral score of one ofthese concertos is an interesting experience. When I did this once, I felt as if I were playing theaccompanying continuo or figured-bass part for organ or harpsichord of a Bach cantata. Chopinmade a lifelong study of Bach, and the results are perceptible in all his w ork.

This goes to the heart of Chopin’s music: his Romanticism was never about the illusion of unmediatedspontaneity at the expense of formal coherence. Even his ‘miniatures’ are the product of rigorousdesign, which he had honed in these larger-scale pieces. Gordon Kerry


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Ewa Kupiec

Ewa Kupiec regularly performs at the world’s leading festivalsand with major orchestras, including the MunichPhilharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, City ofBirmingham Symphony Orchestra, Royal StockholmPhilharmonic Orchestra, Royal Danish Orchestra, WarsawPhilharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra,Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Orchestre de Paris.Conductors with whom she has worked include Marin Alsop,Neeme Järvi, Ingo Metzmacher, Sakari Oramo, SemyonBychkov, Herbert Blomstedt, Krzysztof Penderecki, AndreyBoreyko and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski.

Ewa Kupiec is closely connected to the music of Chopin and other Polish composers. For Sony, she recordedWładysław Szpilman’s music, known from the movie ThePianist. She is also recognised as one of Europe ’s mostdedicated interpreters of contemporary music. Her 2005

Berlin Konzerthaus performance of Schnittke’s First Piano Concerto was the first performance of thatwork since 1964 and was released on the Phoenix label together with other Sc hnittke works for pianoand orchestra.

Among her numerous prizewinning recordings are works by Grażyna Bacewicz, Lutosławski, Szymanowskyand Paderewski. She has released an album of solo w orks by Janáček (Haenssler) and the completeSchnittke piano concertos with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (Phoenix). Recent solo releases onthe Solaris label include works by Chopin and Schubert, and the album Imaginary Landscapes, featuringmusic of Kodály and Enescu. An album of Chopin Nocturnes is available on ABC Classics.

Ewa Kupiec studied in Katowice, at the Chopin Academy in Warsaw and at the Royal Academy of Musicin London; she won the ARD Music Competition (duo piano/cello categor y) in 1992. Since autumn 2011,she has been a professor of piano at the University of Music, Drama and Media, Hanover.

www.ewakupiec.com


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Sebastian Lang-Lessing

German-born Sebastian Lang-Lessing was Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the TasmanianSymphony Orchestra (TSO) from 2004 to 2011.

Awarded the Ferenc Fricsay Prize in Berlin at the age of 24, he subsequently took up a conducting postat the Hamburg State Opera, was appointed resident conductor at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and laterChief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Orchestre Symphonique et Lyrique de Nancy. Under hisdirection, the Opéra de Nancy was elevated to national status, becoming the Opéra National de Lorraine.

His international career started at the Paris Opera, followed by engagements at Los Angeles Opera,San Francisco Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Washington National Opera and the opera companies inOslo and Stockholm. Concert engagements include performances with the Orchestre de Paris, TokyoPhilharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus and major German radio orchestras. He inaugurated the TSO’sannual Sydney season and led the orchestra on a tour of Japan.

His discography includes music by the French composer Guy Ropartz and numerous recordings withthe TSO including the complete Mendelssohn symphonies (with DVD), the complete Schumannsymphonies, Mozart Arias with Sara Macliver, music by Brahms and Schubert with Teddy Tahu Rhodes,Mozart’s Symphonies 39, 40 and 41, Grieg’s Peer Gynt and Holberg Suites, and works by Brett Deanand Saint-Saëns. Forthcoming TSO recordings include Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. His Rienzi atthe Deutsche Oper was recently released on DVD.

Sebastian Lang-Lessing is Music Director of the San Antonio Symphony and Cape Town Opera.

Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra

For more than six decades the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra has been at the forefront of concert lifein Tasmania. Established in 1948 and declared a Tasmanian Icon in 1998, the TSO gives more than 40concerts annually including seasons in Hobart and Launceston, and appearances in Tasmanian regionalcentres. In recent years the TSO has performed at City Recital Hall Angel Place in Sydney and at theAdelaide Festival, and made its debut at Melbourne R ecital Centre in September 2011. Internationaltouring has taken the orchestra to North and South America, Greece, Israel, South Korea, China,Indonesia and Japan.


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Resident in Hobart’s purpose-built Federation Concert Hall, the TSO has a full complement of 47musicians. Marko Letonja is the orchestra’s Chief Conductor and Artistic Director from January 2012.

Australian music is one of the TSO’s focal points. Its Australian Music Program, which was founded in2003, champions music by Australian composers through recordings, performances and commissions,and nurtures promising careers through the annual Australian Composers’ School.

Mindful of its mission to be a source of pride f or all Tasmanians, the TSO performs a wide variety ofmusic. Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, Alfred Brendel, Lisa Gasteen, Nigel Kennedy, SaraMacliver, Howard Shelley, Teddy Tahu Rhodes and Richard Tognetti are among the soloists who haveappeared with the orchestra. Popular and jazz artists who have performed with the orchestra includeRhonda Burchmore, Kate Ceberano, Roberta Flack, James Morrison, Anthony Warlow, Human Natureand The Whitlams.

Christopher Seaman

Christopher Seaman was Music Director to the Rochester Philharmonic (New York) from 1998 to 2011;he is now the orchestra’s Conductor Laureate. He has also held the positions of Music Director to theNaples Philharmonic Orchestra (Florida), Conductor-in-Residence with the Baltimore SymphonyOrchestra, Artistic Advisor of the San Antonio Symphony and Principal Conductor with the BBCScottish Symphony Orchestra and the Northern Sinfonia.

His diverse musical interests are reflected by his repertoire and he is particularly w ell noted for hisinterpretations of early 20th-century English music, Bruckner, Brahms and Sibelius.

Guest conducting engagements have included concerts with the symphony orchestras of Pittsburgh,Detroit, Houston, San Francisco and St Louis; the Royal Liverpool and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras,Bournemouth and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestras, Royal Scottish National Orchestra and thePhilharmonia Orchestra; the Warsaw Philharmonic, Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, Prague RadioSymphony Orchestra, Bergen and Brno Philharmonic Orchestras, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, theGulbenkian Orchestra and Orquestra Nacional do Porto in Portugal, and Het Brabants Orkest in TheNetherlands. He has also conducted the Singapore S ymphony Orchestra, Hong Kong PhilharmonicOrchestra, National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra and Auckland Philharmonia, as well as the Melbourne,Sydney, Adelaide and Queensland Symphony Orchestras.


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Christopher Seaman makes a point of encouraging young talent and has held the post of CourseDirector of the Symphony Services International Conductor Development program in Australia for manyyears. He has also had a long association with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and theGuildhall School of Music and Drama.

His discography includes a Tchaikovsky album with the Rochester Philharmonic and discs of VaughanWilliams and Delius with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 2009, the University of Rochester made Christopher Seaman an Honorar y Doctor of Music.

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is Australia’s oldest orchestra, established in 1906. It is renownedfor its versatility, innovation and for its performances of the great symphonic master works with leadingiinternational and Australian artists including Christine Brewer, Andrew Davis, Edo de Waart, CharlesDutoit, Paavo Järvi, Nigel Kennedy, Yvonne Kenny, Lang Lang, Emma Matthews, Midori, Teddy TahuRhodes, Donald Runnicles, Jeffrey Tate, Bryn Terfel, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Richard Tognetti, Yan PascalTortelier, Osmo Vänskä, Maxim Vengerov and John Williams. It has also enjoyed hugely successfulperformances with such artists as Burt Bacharach, Harry Connick, Jr., John Farnham, Roberta Flack,Ben Folds, Human Nature, Elton John, KISS, kd lang, Tim Minchin, Sting and The Whitlams. Key musicalfigures in the Orchestra’s history include Hiroyuki Iwaki (Chief Conductor and then Conductor Laureate, 1974-2006) and Markus Stenz (Chief Conductor and Artistic Director, 1998-2004). Oleg Caetani was theMSO’s Chief Conductor and Artistic Director from 2005 to 2009.

The MSO has received widespread international recognition in tours to the US A, Canada, Japan, Korea,China and Europe. In addition, the Orchestra tours throughout regional Victoria each year, and presentsan annual concert season in Geelong . Each year the Orchestra performs to more than 200,000 people,at events ranging from the annual Sidney Myer Free Concerts in the Sidney Myer Music Bowl andsubscription concerts in the Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall, to the series of Classic Kids concertsfor young children, and maintains an extensive program of education and community outreach activities.The Orchestra’s Artist Development work includes the Cybec 21st Century Australian ComposersProgram, which each year commissions and performs music by young Australian composers.

Recent CDs include three volumes of symphonies of Alexandre Tansman on the Chandos label (all Diapason d’Or laureates), and for ABC Classics, Heart of Night (concertos by Ross Edwards),


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Pages from a Secret Journal (orchestral works by Richard Mills), Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 ‘From the New World’, Brahms’s A German Requiem and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2, the latest in the orchestra’s MSO Live series, which also includes the final concert given in Australia by Charles Mackerras.

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is funded principally by the Australian Government through the AustraliaCouncil, its arts funding and advisor y body, and is generously supported by the Victorian Government throughArts Victoria, Department of Premier and Cabinet. The MSO is also funded by the City of Melbourne, itsPrincipal Partner, Emirates, and individual and corporate sponsors and donors.


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ABC ClassicsExecutive Producers Martin Buzacott 1-3,

Lyle Chan 4-6, Robert Patterson

Recording Producer Stephen Snelleman

Recording Engineers Veronika Vincze 1-3,

Nic Meirisch 4-6

Editing Veronika Vincze 1-3, Colin Cornish 4-6

Mastering Virginia Read

Publications Editor Natalie Shea

Marketing and Catalogue Coordinator Laura Bell

Booklet Design Imagecorp Pty Ltd

Cover Photo The Seine, Paris © Monica Lau /

Photodisc / Getty Images

Photo p6 © Laion

Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Managing Director Nicholas Heyward

Manager, Artistic Planning Simon Rogers

Orchestra Manager Greg Low

Orchestra Coordinator Jacqui Walkden

Concertmaster Jun Yi Ma

www.tso.com.au

Melbourne Symphony OrchestraChairman Harold Mitchell AC

Principal Guest Conductor Tadaaki Otaka

Patricia Riordan Associate Conductor ChairBenjamin Northey

Director, Artistic Planning Huw Humphreys

Director of Operations Lou Oppenheim

www.mso.com.au

Recorded May 2005 in the Arts Centre, Hamer Hall,

Melbourne 4-6 and 10-11 March 2011 in Federation

Concert Hall, Hobart 1-3.

ABC Classics thanks Jonathan Villanueva.

www.abcclassics.com

� 2005 4-6; � 2012 1-3 Australian BroadcastingCorporation. © 2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Universal MusicGroup, under exclusive licence. Made in Australia. All rights ofthe owner of copyright reserved. Any copying, renting, lending,diffusion, public performance or broadcast of this recordwithout the authority of the copyright owner is prohibited.


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Great Concertos - Chopin Booklet · By contrast, in Op. 11’s finale, the orchestra solemnly...

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