© AI Training forbidden - Selected Classical Music in the Poland of Chopin - Reviewer's Notebook

To honour the memory of my great uncle, the once renowned but now unjustly forgotten Australian concert pianist Edward Cahill (1885-1975), the 2023 Sydney International Piano Competition have generously awarded the EDWARD CAHILL AWARD FOR THE BEST PIANIST IN THE  PRELIMINARIES RECITAL Donated by the Friends of Chopin Australia This prize and the overall 2nd Prize in the entire competition was won by the impressive Belarusian pianist  Uladzislau Khandohi Uladzislau Khandohi was born in Minsk, Belarus, to a family of musicians—dulcimer players. When his parents noticed him picking out melodies on the piano at the age of 7, they took him to music school, where he progressed quickly; he won his first grand prix (at the Mendzelevskaya Open City Competition for young pianists in Mogilev) at age 10, and the first prize of the Sviridov Competition for Young Performers in St. Petersburg a year later.   In 2013, he entered the Republican Music College of the Belarusian State A...

Among the many CDs I have before me, occasionally one stands out prominently for the uniqueness of its subject and the spiritually as well as physically enhancing nature of the music.  Unless blessed with a vivid imagination and a feeling for Spain, one does not readily associate the music of Fryderyk Chopin and Spain. We are partly familiar with the creative yet blighted period Chopin and Sand spent at Valldemossa on Mallorca. Perhaps not the incredible destiny of the small local Spanish piano by Juan Bauza that Chopin struggled with until his Pleyel pianino arrived from Paris. That extraordinary story is covered in detail in Chopin's Piano - A Journey through Romanticism  by Paul Kildea   (London, Allen Lane 2018).   We also adore the modern lightness and charm his Bolero in A minor Op.19, a first indication of a Spanish touch or enthusiasm. The guitar was one of Chopin's favourite instruments, chosen by his teacher  Józef  Elsner to serenade with si...

  ‘ Chopin. The Man, his Work and its Resonance’  is the revised and updated English-language version of Mieczysław Tomaszewski’s multi-award-winning book  ‘Chopin. Człowiek, dzieło, rezonans’  (Poznań, 1998), constituting the sum of the professor’s knowledge and reflections on Chopin-related themes. Having entered the canon of the Chopin studies literature in Poland, gradually, thanks to successive translations, the analyses of Chopin also won over readers outside Poland. The volume became fundamental and obligatory reading for all admirers of the brilliant composer. With time, its stature and multi-aspectual nature were recognized with the ennobling nickname (applied almost tenderly by those who know the professor personally) ‘the bible’. P ublisher:   Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina 2015 924 pages [Translated and edited by John Comber] Professor Mieczysław Tomaszewski is renowned in Poland among musical academic cognoscenti but as he wrote only i...

19TH CHOPIN AND HIS EUROPE FESTIVAL Warsaw 18 August - 1 September 2023   NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME!   The  19th International CHOPIN AND HIS EUROPE FESTIVAL  will take place in Warsaw from 18 August to 1 September this year. As usual, the programme includes Chopin’s work in the context of the epoch and its multidimensional impact on the European composers of the 19th and 20th centuries, which can be traced down in a number of masterpieces by leading artists.  The virtuosos of piano, outstanding chamber music, symphony concerts and the opera in the concert version ‘not for the first time’. The survey is of Polish music from Classicism to the contemporary times, original versions and arrangements. Brilliant historical as well as contemporary performances by excellent but also controversial artists:  Ivo Pogorelic, Kevin Chen, Bruce Liu, Dang Thai Son, Vadym Kholodenko, Kate Liu, Alena Baeva … and many more. The full pr...