The Landmarks of Chopin’s Development as a Composer, 1827-1846

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Henryk Siemiradzki, Chopin plays for the Radziwiłłs, 1829. Oil on canvas, 1887

Henryk Siemiradzki, Chopin plays for the Radziwiłłs, 1829. Oil on canvas, 1887

In preparing a review of last year’s Bard Music Festival, Chopin and his World, I was especially struck by the ability of a festival to present his oeuvre in such a way that the audience could clearly perceive the course of his development as a composer. Jim Samson, one of the preeminent Chopin scholars, I found, had an especially convincing view of his development, which he published in his The Music of Chopin (London, Boston, 1985). The organizers of the Board Festival presented a rather different, but  not irrelevant, selection of Chopin’s works. I still thought it worthwhile to put together musical illustrations to Professor Samson’s outline of the points de repère, the landmarks of Chopin’s development. In my review I suggest that an extra concert devoted to Chopin might fill some gaps. This offering, with multiple performances of some of the works, is more of a Chopin orgy than a concert, but you can of course pick and choose.

I have chosen the performances with some care. They begin with a piano roll of Saint-Saëns and end with George Li, and include a representative selection of the great Chopin players of the past century or more, as well as three especially gifted young pianists who shone at the Bard Festival, Hélène Tysman,  Fei-Fei Dong, and Nimrod David Pfeffer. I hope you enjoy them.

To read my preview of Chopin and his World, click here.

To read my review of Chopin and his World, click here.

About the author

Michael Miller

Michael Miller, Editor and Publisher of New York Arts and The Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts, was trained as a classicist and art historian at Harvard and Oxford, worked in the art world for many years as a curator and dealer, and contributed reviews and articles to Bostonia, Master Drawings, Drawing, Threshold, and North American Opera Journal, as well as numerous articles for scholarly and popular periodicals. He has taught courses in classics, the English language, and art history at Oberlin, Rutgers, New York University, the New School, and Williams. Currently, when he is not at work on The Berkshire Review and New York Arts, he writes fiction, pursues photography, and publishes scholarly work. In 2011 he contributed an introductory essay to Leonard Freed: The Italians / exh. cat. Io Amo L’Italia, exhibition at Le Stelline, Milan, and wrote the revised the section on American opera houses in The Grove Dictionary of American Music. He is currently at work on a libretto for a new opera by Lewis Spratlan, Midi, an adaptation of Euripides’ Medea set in the French West Indies, ca. 1930.

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