̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Chopin

King’s College Chapel, 21 pianos, one very special performance

sjr81 — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 11:12:07 +0000

Taking place in King’s College Chapel on Tuesday (February 21) at 10pm, the Nocturne for 21 Pianos is a collaboration between composer and King’s College Fellow in Music Richard Causton, the Peterborough and Saffron Walden Centres for Young Musicians, King’s College Musical Society and Millers Music.

̽��ֱ��pianos, donated by Cambridge music shop Millers Music and worth more than £50,000, will then be gifted to local schools and institutions, who are being encouraged to apply to receive one of the instruments.

A reworking of Chopin’s original Nocturnes, the concert will see 21 local young musicians play 21 pianos simultaneously. With the pianos arranged in a large circle in the Chapel, it will be both a visual and aural spectacle, with a previous performance in 2010 described as “Eerie, ethereal and enchanting,” by ̽��ֱ��Times.

“This is a unique event for King's College Chapel and the sound and sight of 21 pianos in this wonderful space promises to be really memorable,” said Causton.

“As a child I studied at the Centre for Young Musicians, and I am very happy that pianists from the Peterborough and Saffron Walden branches of CYM will be joining forces with Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� students for this very special performance. It’s a fantastic chance to play in such an awe-inspiring space.”

All 21 pianos have been provided by Millers Music, in celebration of its 160-year anniversary, and its Norwich-based sister store Cookes Pianos, for its 130-year anniversary.

After the event, Millers will gift the pianos to schools and institutions across East Anglia, based on applications received via its website www.millersmusic.co.uk/21pianos. Submissions are now open, and those who apply will need to state why they believe their institution would benefit from a piano.

Entries will be reviewed by a panel of judges, including Richard Causton and Millers managing director, Simon Pollard.

Pollard said: “We’re thrilled to be collaborating with such a prestigious university that celebrates music education. As the oldest music shop group in the UK, we are dedicated to encouraging more young people in the region to embrace music, and gifting these pianos to local institutions does just that.”

̽��ֱ��21 Piano Nocturne concert is part of the Chapel Lates concert series, which Causton also curates. Attendees must arrive at 9.45pm for a 10pm start, with an estimated finish time of 10.50pm. Tickets are priced at £10 (concessions £5 and King’s members £2) and available to buy here and King’s College Visitors Centre.

Schools, community centres, churches and other education institutions in East Anglia are eligible to apply to receive a piano. ̽��ֱ��closing date for applications is Sunday, March 12.

One of the UK’s most iconic buildings will resonate to the sound of 21 pianos on Tuesday evening as part of a unique event involving a Cambridge composer, students, and young musicians from around Cambridgeshire.

This is a unique event for King's College Chapel and the sound and sight of 21 pianos in this wonderful space promises to be really memorable.

Richard Causton

King's College Chapel

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Judging Chopin: notes from the jury

jeh98 — Fri, 25 Sep 2015 15:44:00 +0000

In his day job, John Rink is Professor of Musical Performance Studies and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at St John's College. As a specialist in nineteenth-century music and performance studies, he is also one of 17 members of an international jury appointed to judge the prestigious Chopin Competition in Warsaw this autumn.

Hosted by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, the competition occurs once every five years and is one of only a few devoted entirely to the works of a single composer. Professor Rink, whose musicological research has focused in particular on Chopin, highlights the importance of the competition to budding concert pianists as they forge their careers.

Rink attributes the enduring popularity of Chopin’s music to its “timeless” quality: “One of the reasons why Chopin remains such a popular composer – and, as we will hear in the competition, a composer who invites ever-new interpretations – is because of the rich potential and possibility within the music, which means that it’s not tied to a given time. Instead, it is open to all of us to feel, interpret and make our own as we wish. And that’s a very special property."

During his short career, Chopin (1810-49) composed some 270 works, all of which involve the piano, with the majority consisting of solo piano music. He is widely regarded as one of a handful of composers who understood the instrument “from within”. After attending a recital given by Chopin in 1841, a contemporary critic wrote: “In truth, nothing equals the lightness, the sweetness with which the composer preludes on the piano; moreover nothing may be compared to his works full of originality, distinction and grace.”

Professor Rink’s research has resulted in the publication of books, articles, editions and catalogues of Chopin’s works, as well as a range of books and articles on the subject of musical performance. He currently directs the £2.1 million AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, and the online research projects Chopin's First Editions Online (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council) and Online Chopin Variorum Edition (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). He is also a noted lecture-recitalist, specialising in particular on performances using historic pianos.

In Warsaw he will be part of a hand-picked international jury, led by Polish pianist Katarzyna Popowa-Zydroń and comprising classical pianists and music specialists from Poland, Russia, France, Japan, China, the USA, Argentina, Vietnam and Latvia. Their work will be undertaken in three successive rounds of five days each, culminating in the nail-biting Finals when the winners will be chosen. Rink comments: “Listening eight hours a day to pianists playing Chopin may sound like a pleasure, but it will require intensive concentration and enormous stamina, as well as the application of consistent, sound criteria in order to give each competitor a fair crack of the whip. ̽��ֱ��debates between members of the jury are likely to be lively, to put it mildly!”

For Rink, practical musicianship and scholarly research are not alternatives, but rather two sides of a unified approach to performing, analysing and writing about music – experiences he will draw on in his role as competition juror.

“One of the things that a scholarly approach has helped me to develop over the years is ways of understanding other people’s performances in their own terms. What is a pianist doing? What is he or she trying to get across? Have they discovered something in the music that I have never found there myself? Such discoveries can be enlightening and invigorating. Even if I disagree with aspects of their performance, I may nevertheless regard it as a brilliant conception.”

̽��ֱ��Chopin Competition recitals commence on 3 October 2015, with the winners’ concerts scheduled for 21 –23 October at the Warsaw Philharmonic Concert Hall.

A series of videos created by the Chopin Institute, documenting the jurors’ personal expectations and approaches to the competition, is available on YouTube.

This article was originally published on the St John's College website.

As 82 of the world’s most accomplished young pianists gather in Poland for the 17th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, Juror and College Fellow Professor John Rink reflects on the challenges and rewards of selecting the winning performances.

Frederic Chopin

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̽��ֱ��virtual Chopin

tdk25 — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:12:09 +0000

March 1, 2013 is the 203rd anniversary of the birth of Fryderyk Chopin. Not only is Chopin still a household name: he is probably the most enduring composer of his age.

For some, this comes down to the ineffable beauty, subtlety and technical refinement of his work. Others point to the fact that unlike many Romantic composers, Chopin rarely tried to convey a specific message or story through his music. Publishing under neutral titles which gave little away, he preferred to leave interpretation to the listener. ̽��ֱ��result is that even today, audiences tend to find something uniquely personal in each and every piece.

Yet while listeners can simply sit back and enjoy the music, the obscurity of Chopin’s intentions makes understanding his work a challenge for anyone seeking to get closer to the composer himself. Chopin is both fascinating and frustrating in this respect, because he rarely left behind just one version of his compositions. More often, there are three, four, five or more - any number of which might be an “authoritative” representation of how he wanted the piece to sound. Listeners, performers and researchers alike may find this liberating, but also bewildering because there are so many options from which to choose.

John Rink, Professor of Musical Performance Studies at Cambridge, is director of a project which is transforming the way in which we understand Chopin’s work by bringing this compositional cornucopia together in one place. Launched in 2005 with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the “Online Chopin Variorum Edition” (http://www.ocve.org.uk) is still under development, but eventually it will provide digital images of all the available primary sources of Chopin’s music - whether sketches, complete manuscripts (both Chopin’s and those of copyists), first editions, or later impressions. Thousands of pages from these documents are already available, and the entire site is free of charge. Users anywhere in the world can explore, compare and combine elements from the great composer’s music, comment on it as they go, and ultimately construct their own version of the Chopin work to an extent that has never before been possible.

Purists might call that sacrilege, but Rink believes that it is very much in the spirit of what Chopin wanted. In fact, he describes as “indefensible” the notion that a given version of Chopin was necessarily what the composer would have intended for all time.

“For Chopin there was no single, definitive version: he continually changed his mind,” Rink says. “We might identify a particular source as representing his conception of the music at a given moment, but the next day he might well have heard, played or notated it differently. We therefore need to understand his music as existing in a state of flux, a process involving not only the composer but all those who later come into contact with it – including performers, listeners, editors, critics and so on.”

Contemporary evidence confirms that Chopin’s genius was restless and boundless, in that he continually modified his work on paper while correcting errors, refining the notation, or indulging in other creative possibilities. To minimise the risk of piracy, he also published separate editions in France, England and the German states, usually leading to the release of three distinct versions of his music which might be altered yet again - either by Chopin or his publishers - when a given print run sold out and a new impression was required. Even his rare, sensational public performances were a creative act: according to one of his piano tuners, Chopin never played his own music the same way twice, instead varying his approach to suit the occasion. ̽��ֱ��numerous variants that he pencilled into the scores of his students hint at the improvisatory character of his playing.

Rink can point to numerous examples already available through the Variorum that prove just how flexible the Chopin work is. ̽��ֱ��C minor Prelude Op. 28 No. 20, for example, is a notoriously controversial piece precisely because nobody is sure what Chopin really wanted. Remarkably, the debate hinges on the ending of a single bar. Trivial though that may seem, the music sounds completely different depending on which version is played – one is brighter, the other sombre, introverted. Either could be correct, but then again both versions might simply represent what Chopin wanted at different times. Even more striking, perhaps, is the fact that the piece exists in two original versions: one nine bars long, the other thirteen. Only the latter is performed nowadays, but the former – which was not meant for publication – may reflect Chopin’s earliest conception.

In some cases users can see several layers of corrections on the page itself. ̽��ֱ��Second Ballade Op. 38 is a case in point. Here, Chopin wrote two different endings and then vacillated between them; his manuscript shows the original ending scribbled out and replaced with a second version, which made its way into one of the first editions whereas another conforms to the original. Again, the effect is quite different depending on which ending the pianist chooses to play, as the second version is more imposing than its understated counterpart.

Rink believes that despite this seemingly limitless variety, Chopin’s music should not be altered capriciously. “To make a musically sensible decision about what you put forward as a performer, you need to have sound criteria along with the knowledge and judgement that can accrue only over time,” he says. This last point is critical: “merely having access to the original sources does not in itself allow one to make informed, convincing decisions about how this music ‘should’ be played and understood.”

For this reason, the Variorum provides more than just an archive of digitised manuscripts and printed editions culled from dozens of international libraries and private collectors. Visitors to the OCVE site can browse a full index of the materials that have been uploaded, select a work, then view the different versions on offer. But the main feature of the Variorum is the ability to select and compare particular bars or passages across all the different sources for a given piece, thereby revealing the music’s creative history. Background information is provided at an overview level and on an in-depth, bar-by-bar basis. ̽��ֱ��site also works as a “virtual notepad”, enabling users to jot down ideas about the music as they work their way through it. They can keep these annotations to themselves, or share them with others.

Despite the growing significance of digital media in the arts and humanities as a whole, no musical resource quite like this has ever before been attempted: the Variorum offers unprecedented opportunities to compare and reconstruct Chopin’s creative process in a way that would not be possible on the printed page - where even the comparison of a few bars in different sources requires a large desk as well as juggling skills. In time, Rink hopes that the Chopin Variorum might serve as a model for “dynamic editions” of other composers’ works.

For now, it means that rather than having Chopin’s musical legacy mediated for us, we can, if we wish, make up our own minds about how to hear or perform his works. Ironically, this seems to have been Chopin’s very intention. “Music does not exist in a single, correct version,” Rink notes. “It constantly changes over time. Chopin reminds us of that because he himself kept changing his music. Whenever we perform or listen to it, our experience is different from the last. By putting his compositions into a digital space, we can model and capture that evolutionary process. In doing so, we breathe new life into Chopin’s music and witness for ourselves his compositional genius at work.”

One of the greatest composers of the 19th century, Fryderyk Chopin, had an irrepressible creative imagination, and his music experienced continual evolution as a result. Now, a new online resource is bringing the many versions of his compositions together in one place, opening up new possibilities for performers, listeners and researchers alike.

For Chopin there was no single, definitive version: he continually changed his mind

John Rink

̽��ֱ��Virtual Chopin

̽��ֱ��Morgan Library, accession number Heineman MS 42.

Detail from Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49), Polonaise in A-flat major for piano, Op. 53: autograph manuscript, 1842–43.

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