Classical Music in Poland and the Europe of Chopin - From the Reviewer's Notebook

The last  Pleyel  14810 piano of 1848 played by Fryderyk Chopin in the Fryderyk Chopin Museum Warsaw    Endymion (1818)   John Keats (1795-1821)   A Poetic Romance (excerpt) BOOK I   A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. One may wonder why in Warsaw I open an important music review of a recording of the music of Chopin played on his last Pleyel piano with a quotation from the immortal English poet John Keats. In the domain of music, the poem arouses a singularly appropriate emotional feeling in my heart. This is one of the most significant recordings one can imagine in these benighted times of human barbarity.  I have always found Keats similar in tender yet passionate poetic temperament to Fryderyk Chopin. The last instrument used by the composer, resting now in the Chopin Museum in Warsaw, was r

  Benjamin Britten The Sorcerer's Apprentice-Accompanist Graham Johnson I found this wonderful monologue to be a remarkably detailed, engaging, humorous yet profoundly affecting 'tribute composition' to Benjamin Britten by the composer, advisor, accompanist and music copyist Graham Johnson. He worked with Britten and Pears in close collaboration all his life, devoting much of it to the selfless dissemination of the composer's poignant songs, dramatic operas and orchestral music to the wider world.  Strangely in my twenties I had fully embraced the so-called avant garde (how odd this term now) as a writer and attended Stockhausen’s New Music courses as an observer in Darmstadt in the late 1960s. It had as deep a musical effect on me, this close contact with the composer, as upon Johnson who highlighted such importance in his tribute. This intimate and self-effacing address to us is an extraordinarily 'musical' assembly of the personal experience of love an