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Simon Trpčeski
plays Chopin
Tuesday 24 November 2015 7.30pm, Hall
Chopin
Four Mazurkas, Op 24
Polonaises – Op 26 Nos 1 & 2; Op 44
interval 20 minutes
Simon Fowler
Two Nocturnes, Op 48
Scherzos – No 1, Op 20; No 2, Op 31
Simon Trpčeski piano
This concert will finish at approximately 9.30pm
Part of Barbican Presents 2015–16
Programme produced by Harriet Smith;
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Welcome
Welcome to this evening’s concert, the
second in our series of Keyboard Visionaries.
The Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski
certainly lives up to that billing, and has been
hugely acclaimed in the Romantic repertoire,
and Chopin in particular.
that fascinated the composer throughout
his life. Dances of the peasantry and the
aristocracy respectively, in Chopin’s hands
they are transformed to reveal a completely
new world.
Chopin, too, was a visionary – a fact that
perhaps wasn’t fully appreciated in his own
time, nor in the decades following his early
death.
The nocturnes, by contrast, remind us of
Chopin’s love for opera, and specifically bel
canto. His obsession with creating a singing
line on the piano is famous and it is in the
nocturnes that this quality finds some of its
most inspired outpourings.
What Simon Trpčeski’s programme vividly
demonstrates, however, is the sheer range
of Chopin’s music, and his almost unrivalled
genius for taking an established genre and
developing it in ways that transcended
tradition. The mazurka and the polonaise are
both good examples of this – and are forms
As for the scherzos, they occupy a more
violent, edgy world. Mastering all these
elements requires an artist of the highest
interpretative calibre (not to mention one
possessing a fearsome technique). Which is
where Simon Trpčeski comes in!
Huw Humphreys
Head of Music
Barbican Classical Music Podcasts
2
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Four Mazurkas, Op 24 (1833)
No 1 in G minor; No 2 in C major
No 3 in A flat major; No 4 in B flat minor
Programme notes
Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49)
Polonaises
C sharp minor, Op 26 No 1 (1835)
E flat minor, Op 26 No 2 (1835)
F sharp minor, Op 44 (1841)
Tonight’s all-Chopin recital begins with a genre
indelibly associated with the composer: the
mazurka. Perhaps even more than the nocturne,
waltz and polonaise, he raised this form to an
entirely new artistic level without sacrificing its
essential features. And within its modest span
he conducted experiments more radical than
anywhere else, not only harmonically and
melodically, but in the possibilities of the form’s
essential asymmetry too. Nor, in bringing it into
the salon, did he lose any of the dance’s essential
wildness or primitivism.
the point by beating time to his playing, the
latter is said to have lost his temper completely,
screaming with rage.
Mind you, that wildness and primitivism wasn’t to
all tastes. The critic and second-rate poet Ludwig
Rellstab (set by Schubert to such sublime effect,
proving that you can in fact make a silk purse out
of a sow’s ear) had this to say:
3
‘In search of ear-rending dissonances, torturous
transitions, sharp modulations, repugnant
contortions of melody and rhythm, Chopin
The term ‘mazurka’ in fact refers to not one but
is altogether indefatigable. All that one can
three dances from the Mazovia region of Poland chance upon is here brought forward to produce
– the mazur, the oberek and the kujawiak. All
the effect of bizarre originality, especially the
three are in triple time, with strong accentuation
strangest tonalities, the most unnatural chord
on the second or third beat, but beyond that
positions, the most preposterous combinations in
they encompass a vast range of moods, just as
regard to fingering. But it is not really worth the
Chopin’s own mazurkas do. And that is both
trouble to hold such long philippics for the sake
the challenge and the allure for performers,
of the perverse Mazurkas of Herr Chopin. Had
especially if accounts of the composer’s own
he submitted this music to a teacher, the latter, it is
playing are to be believed. There’s a famous story to be hoped, would have torn it up and thrown it
of Meyerbeer hearing Chopin play a mazurka
at his feet – and this is what we symbolically wish
with such free rubato that he assumed Chopin’s
to do.’
timing was off. He pointed out that it sounded as
if it was in 4/4, so prolonged was the first beat.
Rellstab penned that diatribe in 1833, the year
Chopin insisted he was playing in triple time.
that yielded Chopin’s first mature fruits in the
When Meyerbeer (perhaps unwisely) laboured
genre – Opp 17 and 24. No longer are they
brief diversions – instead they begin to take on
an altogether more profound musical expression
and a sense of the epic that belies their duration.
While the G minor Mazurka that opens the set
is technically undemanding, Chopin gives it
a sly exoticism; this contrasts with the C major
Second, with its dainty musical-box theme and
a secondary idea in the distant realm of D flat
major. The confiding quality of the Third lends it
great charm, and it fades away in a coda of the
utmost delicacy. When Chopin was teaching the
last of his Op 24 set, in B flat minor, his demands
were so specific in terms of voicing and control of
colour that, as his student Wilhelm von Lenz had
it: ‘One was barely allowed to breathe over the
keyboard, let alone touch it!’ The very opening
commands attention with its bold chromaticisms,
something he subsequently uses to give the
mazurka a gritty edge, an effect deepened by the
almost violent juxtaposition of different moods.
Only in the final section is some kind of resolution
reached.
Just as we heard in the Op 24 Mazurkas, it
is with the two Polonaises of Op 26 that we
first find Chopin truly subsuming the original
genre into something more far-reaching. Like
the mazurkas, he wrote polonaises throughout
his life; and if the mazurkas are Chopin’s most
private utterances when it comes to nostalgia for
his embattled homeland, then the polonaises are
the most public. That is fitting, of course, for the
one is humble in origin, the other courtly. Of all
the Polish dance genres that feature in Chopin’s
output, it was the polonaise that provoked in
him the greatest outpouring of both pride in and
nostalgia for his homeland.
With its two-part opening, a central trio and
a recapitulation, all underpinned by the
characteristic polonaise rhythm, the C sharp
minor Polonaise, Op 26 No 1 may be cast
conventionally enough. But it’s what he does
within that framework that elevates it to new
heights. For a start, the trio section functions
almost as a self-contained nocturne – indeed, its
opening has a kinship with the D flat Nocturne,
Op 27 No 2 written the same year – but this
develops into an exquisite bel canto duet, one
Chopin’s biographer James Huneker described
as ‘tender enough to woo a princess’. It is the
contrast between drama and lyricism that gives it
such impact. No 2 is nothing less than a full-scale
tone-poem, with an underlying turbulence as
unhinged as anything Chopin ever wrote. The fact
that its opening rumbling is marked pianissimo
gives it a sinister edge. With its frequent flarings
into violence it’s perhaps unsurprising that in
the 19th century it acquired various nicknames:
‘Siberian’ or ‘Revolt’ among them.
By the time of the F sharp minor Polonaise (1841),
such a simple title could give little hint as to what
lay within: Liszt described it as ‘the lurid hour that
precedes a hurricane’. And indeed Chopin is out
to surprise us, not least in an obsessive-sounding
passage, marked tempo di mazurka, in which
he doesn’t just bring together two dance forms,
but unites that of the aristocracy (the polonaise –
never more buttoned up and precise than here,
the almost obsessively repeated left-hand F sharp
octave holding the music in a stranglehold,
despite a brief slip down to F natural) with that
of the peasantry. But it’s a peasantry that has left
its muddy footwear at the door, for this is one of
his most elegant examples, contrasting with the
opening section in its lighter textures and a focus
on the upper registers of the keyboard. For all the
shattering demands Chopin makes on the pianist,
however, the virtuosity grows from the music itself,
and is never applied from without. The Polonaise
gradually reasserts itself with a show of strength,
the left hand as menacing as ever. And though
there’s a softening of mood, the violent ending is
vehemently in the minor.
4
interval: 20 minutes
Two Nocturnes, Op 48 (1841)
No 2 in F sharp minor; No 1 in C minor
Programme notes
Fryderyk Chopin
Scherzos
No 1 in B minor, Op 20 (c1835)
No 2 in B flat minor, Op 31 (1837)
Those of Op 48 don’t look that tricky on
paper. But that’s deceptive (as so often with
Chopin), for their interpretative challenges are
considerable. And while the composer was still
only just into his thirties at this point, some have
detected in his works from this time a ‘late’ style,
one in which all that is inessential is discarded
and in which a deeper level of profundity is
apparent. No 2 (which Simon Trpčeski plays first
tonight) demands subtlety of the highest order
– it’s all too easy to make the wispy opening
melody overly defined; and the art of keeping
time with the left hand as the right hand floats
free – an obsession of Chopin’s – is never more
tested than here, contrasting with the recitativelike central section, yet another reminder of
Chopin’s love for the opera house.
The tolling opening of the left hand in No 1
is also immediately striking, but so too is the
strikingly spare nature of the right hand’s
rhetoric. The stern minor is ameliorated by an
answering passage in C major, which soon
begins to build, Chopin introducing rumbling
octaves that grow to a climax. The main idea
then returns, now above agitated triplets,
tension maintained virtually up until the end, the
music only subsiding at the very close.
5
From the same year as the F sharp minor
Polonaise come the two Nocturnes, Op 48.
Chopin’s nocturnes have suffered more than
any other genre from ill-judged performances
– very probably because at least some of them
are technically within the reach of amateurs and
students; that, and the fact that their soaring
lines are prone to exaggeration and Romantic
overemphasis. But Chopin was, above all, a
Classicist, for whom Mozart and Bach were
gods. The great Hungarian pianist Louis
Kentner (1905–87) once wrote that the
nocturnes should not ‘suffer critical degradation
because sentimental young ladies used them, in
days long gone by, to comfort their repressed
libido’. Indeed not!
Simon Trpčeski ends with the first two of Chopin’s
four scherzos. All Chopin’s titles transcend their
genres, but that’s especially true in this instance.
A scherzo originally implied a brief, humorous
piece, though by the time he got to it, it had
moved far from the sharp humour of Beethoven
et al. And while Mendelssohn was busy spinning
it into something airborne and vivacious,
Chopin’s are more the stuff of nightmare,
phantasmagorical creatures, utterly individual,
utterly without humour, as if he’s battling against
the very ethos of the form itself. The legendary
pianist Alfred Cortot described them as ‘games,
as it were, of terror, dances feverish and
hallucinatory’, while Schumann famously referred
to ‘cannons buried beneath flowers’.
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Early audiences were literally transfixed by the
opening of the First – did he really mean to
play those notes? When it was first published in
England it gained the title ‘The Infernal Banquet’,
which Chopin, ever the purist when it came to
nicknames, hated. The only respite comes in
a lilting middle section where the composer,
unusually, borrows a genuine Polish folk tune,
before it is subsumed in a sea of chromaticism as
the demonic opening material returns.
The Scherzo No. 2 sets off in the gloom-laden
key of B flat minor. The very opening, consisting
of an unsettling whispered motif and its bellowed
response, caused Chopin’s pupils no end of
trouble. He is reported to have likened it to ‘a
house of the dead’ but he was never satisfied
with their playing of it, demanding it be more
questioning, more hushed, and so on. It’s in
utter contrast with the highly lyrical theme that
follows, in a consoling D flat major. Beauty and
the Beast indeed, and this discourse continues,
with a chorale-like central section that builds in
agitation, reaching a climax before the return of
the opening theme and a coda that emphatically
drives home the major-key ending.
Programme notes © Harriet Smith
Simon Trpčeski
Simon Trpčeski piano
Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski has
established himself as one of the most acclaimed
musicians to have emerged in recent years,
praised not only for his technique and expression,
but also for his warm personality and commitment
to strengthening Macedonia’s cultural image.
He is a frequent soloist in the UK, appearing with
the City of Birmingham and London Symphony
orchestras, Philharmonia, Hallé and the London
and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic orchestras.
Other engagements with major European
ensembles include the Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra, Russian National and Bolshoi Theatre
orchestras, NDR Sinfonieorchester Hamburg,
DSO and RSO Berlin, WDR Cologne, MDR
Leipzig, Tonkünstler Orchestra, Danish National
Symphony Orchestra and the Helsinki, Oslo,
Rotterdam, Royal Flanders, Royal Stockholm,
Strasbourg and St Petersburg Philharmonic
orchestras.
In North America he has performed with the Los
Angeles and New York Philharmonic orchestras,
Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras and the
Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, San
Francisco and Toronto Symphony orchestras,
among others. Elsewhere he has performed
with the New Japan, Seoul and Hong Kong
Philharmonic orchestras, the Adelaide, Melbourne
and Sydney Symphony orchestras, and has toured
with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. He
has worked with leading conductors, including
This season he performs across the globe, visiting
the UK and giving concerts with the San Francisco,
Atlanta, Vancouver and Detroit Symphony
orchestras, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra
and Orquestra Sinfónica Portuguesa. He also
tours with the Helsinki and Oslo Philharmonic
orchestras.
As a recitalist, Simon Trpčeski has given solo
performances in New York, San Francisco,
Washington DC, London, Paris, Amsterdam,
Milan, Munich, Prague, Hamburg, Bilbao,
Istanbul, Dublin and Tokyo.
His award-winning discography includes works
by Chopin, Debussy, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov,
Scriabin and Tchaikovsky. His most recent releases
are a recital on the Wigmore Hall Live label and
Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concertos Nos 1 and 2 with
the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under
Petrenko on Onyx.
Chamber music also forms an important strand of
his musical life and he has appeared at festivals
including Aspen, Verbier, Risør, Bergen and the
Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm. In 2011 he and
cellist Nina Kotova performed works by Chopin
for a theatrical event based on the composer’s
life featuring the actors Jeremy Irons and Sinéad
Cusack at the Tuscan Sun Festival in Cortona, Italy.
He also has a regular duo partnership with cellist
Daniel Müller-Schott.
Simon Trpčeski works regularly with young
musicians in Macedonia in order to cultivate the
talent of the country’s next generation of artists.
Born in the Republic of Macedonia in 1979,
he studied in Skopje with Boris Romanov. He
has received many awards, the most recent of
which was the accolade of National Artist of the
Republic of Macedonia.
7
Lubé Saveski
Marin Alsop, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Lionel
Bringuier, Sir Andrew Davis, Gustavo Dudamel,
Charles Dutoit, Vladimir Jurowski, Lorin Maazel,
Gianandrea Noseda, Sir Antonio Pappano, Vasily
Petrenko, Robin Ticciati, Yan Pascal Tortelier and
David Zinman.
About the performer
About the performer
Mon 14 Dec
Arcadi Volodos
plays Brahms
and Schubert
A pianist steeped
in the Romantic
tradition explores
two of its greatest
composers
‘thoughtful, nuanced
and mercurial’
(The Guardian on Volodos’s 2014 London recital)
Photo: Arcadi Volodos © Marc Egido