Cho Choppin

The Poulenc Violin Sonata is still a relative rarity on record. I'm baffled by this, as it is one of Poulenc's most unique and musically rewarding works. This performance by Lin and Crossley is excellent; indeed they nearly match the superlative recording made by Kolja Blacher and Eric Le Sage for RCA. The brighter, more lively RCA recording adds a little extra sparkle and energy to the latter. However, in both instances, each violinist has the benefit of being joined by pianists who have made a specialty of Poulenc.

Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki (1933–2010) achieved an international success in the mid-1990s, with his Symphony No. 3, “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”. Since then, Gorecki’s name has been associated almost exclusively with this piece. However, his music is much more than this one brilliant work. Gorecki never looked at musical fashions, but consistently created his own sound universe. In the 1980s Gorecki, feeling misunderstood, stepped back from the official concert life in Poland. He reached out to simple folk and church melodies, making their choral arrangements.

Seong-Jin Cho garnered international attention and critical accolades through his first prize victory in the 2015 Warsaw Chopin Competition, followed by a studio recording pairing Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 and the 4 Ballades. Five years later, Seong-Jin returns to Chopin with a complementary program consisting of the romantic Piano Concerto No. 2 and the 4 Scherzi.

Chopin is touted to be the ‘poet’ of the piano. One must wonder what that means. A poem is an art form of taking written words and arranging them so that language is elevated up to an artistic realm. I feel Chopin, then, was indeed a poet of the piano. He took the extant musical language of his time, expanded the musical vocabulary, and arranged them to make the expanded scope of expression possible. Chopin’s music requires a specialised kind of pianism: supple yet strong fingers, an almost infinite range of tone colours, a sense of timing that is well-proportioned but not exaggerated, etc. Nina Svetlanova was my teacher during my doctoral studies at the Manhattan School of Music. She entered Heinrich Neuhaus’s studio in Moscow when she was sixteen. In that studio, she learned of secret know-hows of piano playing. Playing legato (or mimicking as best as you could) was part of countless brilliant ways of playing the piano.

Pianist Seong-Jin Cho shares his love for Handel’s often neglected keyboard suites on his latest album, The Handel Project. Each of the suites is brilliantly full of character and life, and Cho has chosen his three favourites for his new album, saying, “For me, Handel’s music comes directly from the heart.” Brahms loved the suites too, and Cho has also recorded the latter’s spectacular Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, based on one movement from Suite No. 3.