Chopin Week: the Mazurkas

By Ivan Hewett Published: 4:18PM GMT twenty-two February 2010

If theres one genre that captures the hint of Chopin, the certainly the Mazurka. These triple-time dances appear medium on the surface; customarily theres an opening melody, a resisting center bit (bright and major-key where the opening was grave and minor-key, or vice-versa), and a reprise of the opening, the total thing lasting no some-more than 3 or 4 minutes.

They have the gloss and overwhelming rhythmic lilt of his waltzes, and spasmodic you could inapplicable designation one for the other. But not often, since since the strut is a reception room genre through-and-through, the mazurka has a spice of something really different, something worldly and melancholic.

Chopin Week: the Preludes Chopin Week: the Ballades Chopin Week: the Etudes Chopin 2010, Warsaw Philharmonic Concert Hall, examination Chopin Week: the sonatas Other TV Highlights: Monday sixteen Mar

In Chopins girl the mazurka was the arty, Warsaw version of 3 dances of the Mazovian solid of executive Poland. In his early mazurkas, created in the late 1820s prior to he left Poland, Chopin even court sequence up the standard Mazovian folk-band, with the bagpipe and stamping fibre bass.

Once in outcast in Paris, Chopin focuses all his jingoist yearning on the mazurka, that takes on a new meaning. From being a medium image of a nation dance it right away becomes some-more similar to an idealised portrait, receiving on aspects of alternative quintessential Chopin genres such as the unreal Prelude. The C pointy teenager mazurka Op thirty even rises to the drastic aspirations of the Ballade, but - in a standard Chopin annulment - the finale sinks in an perspective of despondency and defeat.

The after mazurkas from the 1840s mostly concentration all their comfortless feelings on enormously lengthened codas, and Chopin fashions transitory lead-backs to the strange tune that are as pointed as anything in Brahms. All this shatters the strange dance form, but on the alternative palm the folk roots are never utterly lost.

The multiple of elementary roots and low-pitched lack of simplicity creates these dances really formidable to perform, and theres the combined plea of the special mazurka rhythm, that infrequently stresses the second beat, infrequently the third. Michelangeli creates these small dances splendidly other-worldly, but a little might feel Garrick Ohlsson binds their worldly and polished aspects in a improved balance. The enormous celebrity suggested in or Rubinsteins 1938-9 version for me creates it incomparable.

RECOMMENDED

Artur Rubinstein, Complete Mazurkas (1938-39 version), Naxos 8.110656-57, �8.99

Garrick Ohlsson, Complete Mazurkas, Helios CDH55391&2, �11.98

Arturo Benedetto Michelangeli, Selected Mazurkas, DG Originals 4777535, �9.99

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