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Playing Chopin Like Chopin
Wednesday, 28 September 2005
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Jan. 23, 1927 is a historic date because of the inauguration in Warsaw of the International Frédéric Chopin Piano Competition. The first participant was Bolesław Woytowicz. The competition began at the initiative of Jerzy Żurawlew, who—as a heir to the romantic Chopin tradition taken over from Prof. Aleksander Michałowski—was disturbed by increasingly widespread opinions that Chopin was “not modern enough and too subtle.”
This debate led to the idea for a music competition dedicated to only one composer. Prof. Żurawlew saw no reason why, in the face of the expansion of modernism of Stravinsky or Prokofiev, the music of Chopin should be relegated to the margins. A new form needed to be found that would attract young people to the music.
Those were the beginnings of the music competition, regarded today as the most important and most highly renowned. Its position, along with a record number of submitted participants, is determined by its list of laureates to date, featuring names of the greatest masters of the art of the piano: Lev Oborin, Stanisław Szpinalski, Grigory Ginzburg, Alexandre Uninsky, Louis Kentner, Yakov Zak, Witold Małcużyński, Jan Ekier, Halina Czerny-Stefańska, Bella Davidowich, Barbara Hesse-Bukowska, Władysław Kędra, Tadeusz Żmudziński, Viktor Merzhanov, Adam Harasiewicz, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Fou Ts’ong, Lidia Grychtołówna, Maurizio Pollini, Martha Argerich, Garrick Ohlsson, Mitsuko Uchida, Piotr Paleczny, Janusz Olejniczak, Eugene Indjic, Krystian Zimerman, Dang Thai-Son, Tatiana Shebanova, Ewa Pobłocka, Stanislav Bunin, Krzysztof Jabłoński, Kevin Kenner, Alexei Sultanov, Philippe Giusano and Yundi Li.
Since its very inception, the competition has highlighted certain phenomena that usually go unnoticed. “Performance quality turned out to be so high that the jury found itself in real trouble,” wrote Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz in 1927 . “The immensity of skill achieved today by almost children—Goldsand at 16, Oborin at 19!—prompts the reflection: what next? In terms of technique, young people leave behind the best pianists of the older generation, but what is going to happen with this shocking pianist hyperproduction?”
The questions Iwaszkiewicz posed years ago are still valid and have returned during each of the 14 consecutive competitions. There is every indication that these questions will also pertain to this year’s edition. The age of the youngest virtuosos has steadily decreased, while their technical capabilities remain simply incredible. The problem, however, is that the “technical Chopin” interpretation is of little interest today—just like in the 1920s Chopin was not accepted according to the contemporary esthetics under ‘s Stravinsky’s influence.
The triumph of the First Competition by representatives of Slavic schools, Russians and Poles such as Oborin, Szpinalski, Etkin-Moszkowska, Ginzburg and Sztompka—who demonstrated “old piano playing traditions in fresh, young and shining vestments”—might still be the best formula for playing Chopin today.
Jan Popis
This article appears courtesy of The Warsaw Voice.
You will find more articles in connection with the 15th International F. Chopin Piano Competition in a competition Gazette at www.konkurs.chopin.pl and www.chopin.warsawvoice.pl
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