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| Chopin performing on a Pleyel pianino at a visionary Ball at the Hotel Lambert Paris (detail) Teofil Kwiatowski (1809-1891) |
The observations in this post have been prompted by the forced and tragic resignation of Mr. Stanislaw Leszczynski, the brilliant Artistic Director of the Chopin i jego Europa Festival and Deputy Director of the Chopin Institute, Warsaw. He also pioneered the great recording initiative of The Real Chopin series of Chopin's entire corpus on CD recorded on original instruments, some purchased for the Chopin Institute under his expert guidance. He has a true passion for early keyboard instruments. Many of the finest Chopin interpreters living have recorded on the Institute's fine 1849 Erard or the superb 1848 Pleyel.
I am sure the explanation is a labyrinthine plot worthy of an Agatha Christie novel and I am not privy to the details but I am fully entitled as a musician to have a strong opinion on the matter.
I am sure the explanation is a labyrinthine plot worthy of an Agatha Christie novel and I am not privy to the details but I am fully entitled as a musician to have a strong opinion on the matter.
Anyone who has read my literary travel book on the country A Country in the Moon will know the tremendous admiration I have for Poland, Poles and particularly the city of Warsaw. Granted, like many Poles I do not necessarily harbour a great love of the modern city but I do have enormous admiration for the inexpressible courage that rebuilt the ruins, admiration that the city exists at all after the horrors of the Second World War, a beautiful and wonderful city in the leafy summer months and in the winter under snow.
One of the great personal paradoxes for me as a foreigner aquainted with the country for many years is that sufficient and authentic political will to support culture does not appear to exist in this country. It is a scandal and a tragedy at once.
I am an Australian. We built one of the world's great opera houses in Sydney at a time when Australia was not considered a particularly 'cultured' country (considered quite the opposite in the UK – the film Crocodile Dundee was many things but 'cultured' does not spring to mind). Australia was not rich at that time and it was a country mainly obsessed with and outstanding at sport. But the political will to improve our image culturally speaking was there in abundance and look at the result - an iconic building in world terms that has brought immeasurable benefits both financial and in terms of world image to my country. Apart from revolutionising the performance of music (there is a 24 hour FM Opera Music Radio Station in Sydney) it continues to fuel tourism at a tremendous rate. Everyone in the world wants to see the Sydney Opera House and attend a concert or opera there.
Many older people of taste and refinement in Poland, people whose integrity I respect, have told me matters were far better in education and cultural support under Polish Socialism. Funds are at present constantly being cut to private orchestras; Polish musicians of great talents are passed over for foreign musicians who have more 'celebrity'; far more seriously, teachers in local schools lack the funds to properly musically educate wonderfully talented and enthusiastic Polish children.
At least Mr Leszczynski the former Deputy Director of the National Chopin Institute, the former Artistic Director of the superb Chopin i jego Europa Festival, was battling terribly hard to reverse this process and present us with unknown Polish composers and home-grown Polish musicians of enormous, world-class abilities. This was a festival of undoubted world class. The superb late-night concert with Martha Argerich and Polish musicians was a case in point. In 2011 he somehow managed to fund a visit here by the magnificent Russian National Orchestra under Mikhail Pletnev and also the Orchestre des Champs-Elysees and Collegium Vocal Ghent under Philippe Herreweghe - all orchestras in the highest world class and reputation.
To quote the immortal Goon Show, a BBC precursor to Monty Python, after 1989 culturally speaking in music in Poland 'Suddenly nothing happened'. His was an uphill battle against lack of proper political will to truly and substantially financially support musical culture and musical cultural initiatives. Great things have been achieved, some quite extraordinary, in many areas of life in Poland since 1989 but culture, especially musical culture, is not convincingly one of them. This comment excludes the very fine classical music station Dwojka which I consider one of the most intellectually uncomprising and musically enlightening in the world - yes, really and I used to work in radio professionally many years ago.
The problem seems to me a question of the Polish temperament, lack of consensus concerning culture, perceived financial priorities and not having the political will to accommodate musical culture into life as a vital and civilised part of human existence.
Could not politicians put something concrete behind all this parading of Chopin as 'the great Pole', the great world composer. He was all these things but can we not see something solid (financial backing) to support all the fine words, all the window dressing ?
The problem seems to me a question of the Polish temperament, lack of consensus concerning culture, perceived financial priorities and not having the political will to accommodate musical culture into life as a vital and civilised part of human existence.
Could not politicians put something concrete behind all this parading of Chopin as 'the great Pole', the great world composer. He was all these things but can we not see something solid (financial backing) to support all the fine words, all the window dressing ?
The secret of success in life surely is to think positively, work together in consensus and 'give it a go mate' to be Australian for a moment. It is how my great country was built, hewn out of the roughest bushland tens of thousands of miles from anywhere only a couple of hundred years ago.
After the fall of Polish Socialism in 1989 there is no-one left to blame for this scandalous neglect of cultural matters in Poland, a country that in the past prided itself on its many great world class pianists, conductors and composers. Why is there no political consensus on cultural priorities in 2012?
After the fall of Polish Socialism in 1989 there is no-one left to blame for this scandalous neglect of cultural matters in Poland, a country that in the past prided itself on its many great world class pianists, conductors and composers. Why is there no political consensus on cultural priorities in 2012?
Mr. Leszczynski is to be heartily congratulated on his incredible courage and success in attracting foreign artists to the country. What a pity his great talent to persuade and attract many truly great artists cannot be significantly supported politically and financially. He has resigned his post in absolute and cruel frustration. It is a tragedy that must be reversed.
Arnold Schoenberg wrote a rarely-read excellent short essay entitled Franz Liszt - His Work and Being published in the interesting collection of his writings entitled Style and Idea. In the essay I quote an extract from which you may draw your own conclusions on its appositeness in the present case :
For musical life, for example, is certainly much the same in its essentials as it was before Liszt. It has a different colour, partly different forms, an above all new names. But the essence, the routine, the fashion, the ignorance and pettiness, the envy and intrigue, the success of the incompetent and mediocre, the failure of the truly important, the money-making of the adaptable and the poverty of the independent-willed - that has all stayed the same as it was before.....Musical life has its great ones on whom to model itself , and it honours them - but from a distance! (Faber and Faber, London 1975, p. 446)
Polemic over but the tragedy remains and what now of the future? Mr. Leszczynski must return with his festival, his great creation or the cultural loss to Poland will be incalculable.
