Sphinx Music: Chopin Préludes
Posted by: herm on 10 July 2003
Romantic Era music abounds in showcases of character pieces, like Schumann's Carnaval and Davidsbündlertänze, Mendelsohn's Lieder ohne Wörte, but the most fascinating and daunting set of all has to be Chopin's Préludes Opus 28 (1839).
As a whole these 24 pieces, lasting about 40 minutes, are among the most difficult mainstream keyboard works. I can't recall ever hearing them performed in a live recital, which probably means there are not a lot of musicians who want to take the risk.
There's a fair number of technically doable pieces, but there's a spareness which exacts a lot from the performer, as in the Lento no 13, and next thing you know you're in a doomed fingerbreaking race like no 14, which clocks in well under a minute and no one knows what character the piece is supposed to express, except that it's really really scary.
So you can skip the hard pieces, or play them as bravura displays in isolation, like performers did in the first hundred years the Preludes existed. Even a pianist like Sviatoslav Richter picked his way through the Preludes, playing less than half of them.
I believe Alfred Cortot was one of the first performers to play the Preludes in their entirety, as a statement these were not 24 pieces. The Preludes were one big piano panorama. I have had records of the Preludes as long as I can remember. Through the Nineties my favorite has been the Ashkenazy recording. Admittedly his way of playing is a little too velvety poetic at times. However the sequence is fully convincing as a story, starting with one of the best opening preludes on record.
The 1946 Rubinstein Preludes show how difficult this opening prelude is. It's in 2/8 time and no matter how hard you look at the page, the 'melody' is virtually invisible. It somewhere in the middle, in the thumbs. Go figure. It's like the finale of the Piano sonata, mysterious and more than a little unplayable (and there's several of these sphinx-like pieces in the Preludes) - however this time it's at the beginning of the entire piece! Rubinstein refashions the entire time structure of the piece in order to play a melody. It's strange. In Chopin Rubinstein would be your Old Reliable, but sometimes his Preludes are pretty miserable. He didn't ever record the piece again, unlike most other Chopin works.
Another Preludes I want to mention is the mid-seventies Ivan Moravec recording on Supraphon. It's a must-have recording, I only because it's so different from most others. Moravec's Preludes last about as long as most others and yet virtually every piece sounds shorter, because of Moravec's non-legato playing. The notes are more clipped than with a 'poetic' Chopin-player like Ashkenazy. The upside is you get to hear more. The downside is, sometimes more is less. Also, the 24 pieces do not sound as a big organic sequence, culminating in the Revolutionary prelude. In fact this last piece is positively dull, because of the neat non-legato left hand.
The reason I'm writing this is the live recording by Claudio Arrau, taped at the Prague Spring Festival 1960, which I bought on a Appian Recording disk in Paris, recently. I have had the official Philips recording of Arrau's Preludes for a long time. Somehow they were too controlled to really catch me. However, the Prague recordings from thirteen years earlier are completely fascinating. Together with the Cortot recording (and they are polar opposites) these are by far the best Preludes I have ever heard. Cortot is a right handed pianist. Arrau is a lefty. He's is very much into structure and drama coming from the deep end. In the 1973 studio recording this sounds a bit deliberate. In the live recording all this deliberateness gets eliminated by the sheer dramatic power of the interpretation.
Perhaps prelude one is still a little shaky, but from the second piece onwards we're in the grip of an all-encompassing drama. The lyric pieces are wonderful beams of light, and yet from the beginning we know this is not going to be pretty, with the previously mentioned no 14 as a clear sign of looming disaster. This is death growling at the doorstep. (at 49 seconds Arrau takes it significantly slower than Moravec (0:22) or Cortot (0:34); the interesting thing is, Arrau's 1973 recording has the exact same timing, and yet it doesn't have that vertiginous growl). Arrau's Chopin is the man we know from the famous Délacroix portrait; a man who's repulsed by Romanticism with its notions of naïvety and ecstacy; he's repulsed by Schumannesque Romaticism. Yet in the end, in this wonderful 1960 recording he is an even bigger romantic than Schumann. And different.
Let me add the disk has the Schumann Symphonic Etudes (recorded in 1976) as an extra. They are not as splendid.
So what I'm inviting you to do is post your favorite Chopin Préludes, please. These are endlessly fascinating pieces and I want to hear more about them.
Herman
http://forums.naim-audio.com/eve/forums?a=tpc&s=67019385&f=38019385&m=2421935156
As a whole these 24 pieces, lasting about 40 minutes, are among the most difficult mainstream keyboard works. I can't recall ever hearing them performed in a live recital, which probably means there are not a lot of musicians who want to take the risk.
There's a fair number of technically doable pieces, but there's a spareness which exacts a lot from the performer, as in the Lento no 13, and next thing you know you're in a doomed fingerbreaking race like no 14, which clocks in well under a minute and no one knows what character the piece is supposed to express, except that it's really really scary.
So you can skip the hard pieces, or play them as bravura displays in isolation, like performers did in the first hundred years the Preludes existed. Even a pianist like Sviatoslav Richter picked his way through the Preludes, playing less than half of them.
I believe Alfred Cortot was one of the first performers to play the Preludes in their entirety, as a statement these were not 24 pieces. The Preludes were one big piano panorama. I have had records of the Preludes as long as I can remember. Through the Nineties my favorite has been the Ashkenazy recording. Admittedly his way of playing is a little too velvety poetic at times. However the sequence is fully convincing as a story, starting with one of the best opening preludes on record.
The 1946 Rubinstein Preludes show how difficult this opening prelude is. It's in 2/8 time and no matter how hard you look at the page, the 'melody' is virtually invisible. It somewhere in the middle, in the thumbs. Go figure. It's like the finale of the Piano sonata, mysterious and more than a little unplayable (and there's several of these sphinx-like pieces in the Preludes) - however this time it's at the beginning of the entire piece! Rubinstein refashions the entire time structure of the piece in order to play a melody. It's strange. In Chopin Rubinstein would be your Old Reliable, but sometimes his Preludes are pretty miserable. He didn't ever record the piece again, unlike most other Chopin works.
Another Preludes I want to mention is the mid-seventies Ivan Moravec recording on Supraphon. It's a must-have recording, I only because it's so different from most others. Moravec's Preludes last about as long as most others and yet virtually every piece sounds shorter, because of Moravec's non-legato playing. The notes are more clipped than with a 'poetic' Chopin-player like Ashkenazy. The upside is you get to hear more. The downside is, sometimes more is less. Also, the 24 pieces do not sound as a big organic sequence, culminating in the Revolutionary prelude. In fact this last piece is positively dull, because of the neat non-legato left hand.
The reason I'm writing this is the live recording by Claudio Arrau, taped at the Prague Spring Festival 1960, which I bought on a Appian Recording disk in Paris, recently. I have had the official Philips recording of Arrau's Preludes for a long time. Somehow they were too controlled to really catch me. However, the Prague recordings from thirteen years earlier are completely fascinating. Together with the Cortot recording (and they are polar opposites) these are by far the best Preludes I have ever heard. Cortot is a right handed pianist. Arrau is a lefty. He's is very much into structure and drama coming from the deep end. In the 1973 studio recording this sounds a bit deliberate. In the live recording all this deliberateness gets eliminated by the sheer dramatic power of the interpretation.
Perhaps prelude one is still a little shaky, but from the second piece onwards we're in the grip of an all-encompassing drama. The lyric pieces are wonderful beams of light, and yet from the beginning we know this is not going to be pretty, with the previously mentioned no 14 as a clear sign of looming disaster. This is death growling at the doorstep. (at 49 seconds Arrau takes it significantly slower than Moravec (0:22) or Cortot (0:34); the interesting thing is, Arrau's 1973 recording has the exact same timing, and yet it doesn't have that vertiginous growl). Arrau's Chopin is the man we know from the famous Délacroix portrait; a man who's repulsed by Romanticism with its notions of naïvety and ecstacy; he's repulsed by Schumannesque Romaticism. Yet in the end, in this wonderful 1960 recording he is an even bigger romantic than Schumann. And different.
Let me add the disk has the Schumann Symphonic Etudes (recorded in 1976) as an extra. They are not as splendid.
So what I'm inviting you to do is post your favorite Chopin Préludes, please. These are endlessly fascinating pieces and I want to hear more about them.
Herman
http://forums.naim-audio.com/eve/forums?a=tpc&s=67019385&f=38019385&m=2421935156
quote:If, on top of that, he perpetually slams his left hand onto the lower notes, then it is Sviatoslav Richter. Great he is, but please hide all Chopin scores away from him.
He was a Slav, or at least he had a typical Slav name. His playing was dark, romantic, misty, very sensuous and rhythmically rather free.
There is an exception to it though - his selection of Chopin Preludes played at Tokyo in 1979 represents one of the greatest piano moments in history.
I won't extend my description as I've talked about that record for dozens of times here
Cheese