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

                                                                              Ari Rossner/Warner Classics  London has irresistible musical and artistic attractions and over the last three weeks I have sampled what the great metropolis has to offer. However during my aesthetic promenade among the paintings of Modigliani, Picasso, Monet at the National Gallery and the Impressionists at the Courtauld, I did not anticipate I would have one of the great musical experiences of my life - a recital by the visionary Polish musician and pianist Piotr Anderszewski interpreting Bach and Beethoven at the Barbican.   The nineteenth century English poet William Wordsworth spoke of poetry as only able to be produced by '...a man who being possessed of more than usual ...

Apelles Painting Campaspe (1630) by  the Flemish artist  Willem van Haecht  (1593 – 1637) [Scenic backdrop of the production] It is always of great interest in life to stumble over a rare, normally inaccessible and forgotten work of art. An apple on the moon. In this case it was a small chamber opera by the eminent Polish composer Karol Kazimierz Kurpiński (1785-1857) that had not been performed in repertory for some two hundred years.   Outside of his native land, his name would certainly only be known to a few specialist musicologists in western countries despite being the most prominent Polish composer before Fryderyk Chopin. Born in  Włoszakowice, a small village   in west-central Poland, some sixty kilometers from Pozna ń, he was the son of the local organist and the daughter of a village civil servant. From 1800 to 1808 he played the violin in the orchestra of Count Feliks Polanowski at his seat near Lw ó...

Chopin's birthplace at Żela zowa Wola about 50 kms from Warsaw I decided to make the effort to attend the birthday recital at Żela zowa  Wola on an uncompromisingly and rather abnormal freezing day on 1st March (-10C). Brrrr.... The romantic intimacy I remember of my first visit to the  dwórek  and hamlet in the early 1990s has rather disappeared with a quite understandable development of the site to cope with the freedom of the global touristic movement that Poland now enjoys - restaurant, ticket hall, shop, recital and lecture theatre - the full unfolding of facilities for visitors but with the inevitable loss of some of the romantic poetry and mystery of the domain.  I would like to quote my first impressions of what was for me a deeply poetic place. In an access of nostalgia the extract comes from my book about Poland entitled  A Country in the Moon (Granta -London 2008).         ...