© Protected - Selected Classical Music in Poland and the Europe of Chopin - Reviewer's Notebook

  Lake and Temple at Arkadia In Stage II of the Chopin  Piano Competition  we listened to many interpretative examples of the  Chopin  Preludes  For this reason before you read the reviews: Some thoughts on the Chopin Preludes Schumann famously and memorably referred to them as  'sketches, beginnings of Etudes, or, so to speak, ruins, individual eagle pinions, all disorder and wild confusion.' Improvisation or  'préluder'  before embarking on an extensive work in the same key was well established among composer-pianists of the day but has been largely abandoned except by those few knowledgeable performers on the period piano.  Chopin was a master of ambiguity and luring the listener into false expectations. He often performed the  Preludes  as separate pieces or in groups possibly arranged in pairs. One reads in his 1842 Parisian recital: ' Nocturnes, Préludes and Etudes'.  In those days there was far less academic at...

  This is a particularly significant, symbolic and resonant All Saints Day and All Souls Day, recumbent in the shadow of many wars and now the travails of the English Royal Family concerning a continuing saga of  Andrew Mountbatten Windsor . Just last night a mysterious and horrifically arbitrary stabbing on a public train in the UK. The moral, cultural and behavioral fabric of society everywhere seems to be unraveling like once beautiful but now overworn carpet. I have found it so difficult to sleep in recent weeks and last night? In Ukraine over years of war, accurate reports are difficult to unearth, concealed for 'security reasons'. In the conflict, sources indicate hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have been killed so far. In the Middle East there are even more terrible statistics concerning Palestinian civilians. The flawed human consciousness of the sacred nature of life throws me into despair.  Death and injury is barbarously forced upon thou...