Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 2 / Zacharias (full-length)

Frédéric Chopin Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor Recorded May 14, 2016 at the Ordway Concert Hall The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra Christian Zacharias, conductor and piano https://www.thespco.org/   / thespco     / thespco   About the music: Chopin was not yet twenty when he completed his Piano Concerto in F Minor. Though it was the first of his two piano concerti, it was published second and thus designated his Piano Concerto No. 2. (Chopin set to work on his Concerto “No. 1” in E Minor shortly following the F Minor’s premiere.) Both concerti, merely by virtue of their existence, inevitably invite comparison to the piano concerti of Mozart and Beethoven, at that time the genre’s definitive works. Measured by that standard, Chopin’s concerti routinely fail to satisfy—but this is a misguided criterion. Chopin’s concerti do not strive to create the cogent musical drama of Mozart’s and Beethoven’s, with their Jungian archetypal soloists navigating a rich cosmos manifested by the orchestra. Chopin’s F Minor Concerto (and likewise its E Minor sibling) is a piano concerto in the most truly Romantic sense: it is a soloist vehicle, an unabashed celebration of pianistic virtuosity. The stile brillante of Hummel, Weber, and others offers a more accurate lens on Chopin’s concerti—viewed through which, even these youthful works must be regarded among the finest of their kind. (Robert Schumann surmised that “if a genius such as Mozart were to appear today, he would write Chopin concertos rather than Mozart ones.”) The Concerto comprises three movements. The opening Maestoso is a heady portrait of nineteenth-century Sturm und Drang. A Larghetto of breathtaking loveliness follows. In each of these, Chopin places the piano prominently in the foreground, but particularly in the slow movement, where the orchestra often provides little more than a translucent halo around the soloist’s ecstatic flourishes. This heartfelt rhapsody was inspired by a young singer, Constantia Gladkowska, who had charmed Chopin. “I have … found my ideal,” the composer wrote to a friend, “whom I worship faithfully and sincerely. … But in the six months since I first saw her I have not exchanged a syllable with her of whom I dream every night, she who was in my mind when I composed [the Larghetto].” Notwithstanding the ardor of the slow movement, Chopin saves arguably his most personal statement for the finale, a brilliant Allegretto vivace whose rhythmic character draws from the mazurka, a folk dance from the composer’s native Poland. Patrick Castillo ©2016