A Reflection on the 10th National Chopin Piano Competition

A special reflection on this year’s competition from board member Edith Hall Friedheim.

Anyone lucky enough to have attended the recent National Chopin Competition at the Miami Dade County Auditorium heard some splendid piano playing, much of it free of charge, over the course of 9 days, Feb. 22nd to Mar. 1st.

To begin with, the 25 young pianists I heard (ages 16-26) deserve the highest praise for their skill, courage and commitment. Every one of them delivered Chopin with such technical and musical finesse as to convince this listener at least that the great Polish composer is safe with the current generation.

The Quarter-Finals, Feb. 24 & 25

As a latecomer arriving Monday morning - the Preliminary Round had taken place two days earlier - how best can I catch up with the musical personalities I am about to hear? By listening, of course, but also from their program choices. Of 26 pianists only four have opted for the F Minor rather than E Minor Concerto. Certainly not the usual jury favorite.This tells me we’re dealing with four individualists willing to leave the safety net of tradition behind and risk the near impossible.

Do I Hear a Waltz?

Of all the required elements in this and in the upcoming International Competition in
Warsaw in October, 2020, none is more elusive than the Waltz. Chopin wrote about 25 of them; 18 survive. No less an authority - not to mention Chopin advocate -  than Robert Schumann described them as “aristocratic from the first note to the last”. Why then do so many younger pianists have problems with Chopin’s fast waltz tempo, let alone the inherent elegance of these miniatures? With one or two exceptions, I heard instead etudes often played relentlessly fast and too loud, and lacking either charm or wit. In other words, un-waltz-like.

We know a lot about Chopin’s pianistic style, its rich and “romantic” emotional content within a framework of classical restraint. “Under his fingers every note sounded like singing, every measure was like a word, every phrase a thought shorn of pathos but ... simple and noble”, wrote Chopin’s student and no mean pianist himself, Karol Mikuli. Add to this the “Polishness” of the music itself, especially in the differences in character of tempo rubato between the Mazurkas, Ballades, Polonaises and Concerti. I have a nasty aversion to pianists who sacrifice rhythmic stability to exaggerated rubato. Flexibility of rhythm should never interfere with the forward direction of the phrase.

Speaking of Polonaise

Chopin composed his first at age seven. Today we listened to seven versions of the Andante spiniato and Grande Polonaise Brilliante in E Flat Major, Op.22, written in 1834 and 1831 respectively and later joined as two “movements” of the same concert piece. Today’s interpretations by two last-named but unrelated Jones’s, Fantee and Timothy, were especially well rendered, and Victor Shlyakhtenko’s and Umi Garrett’s performances had some exquisite moments. Earlier that morning Christopher Richardson tackled - with mixed results - the Polonaise-Fantasie, Op. 61 (which nobody under the age of 40 should even attempt), that late expression of anguish that marked the end Chopin’s sadly brief life.

What’s in a Name?

Time was when pianists had unpronounceable names like Cherkassky, Essipov, Gabrilowitsch, Lhevinne, Moiseiwitsch, Slobodyanik; the list is endless. Now, a century or so later we have three Competition contestants named Smith and Jones. Fantee Jones’s G Minor Ballade Op. 23 No. 1 spun out its story in a variety of moods, from the sweetest ”dolce” to an almost demonic “appassionata”, not once distorting the architectural contours with too much rubato. I might have done with less agogic from Timothy Jones but he covered the distance from poetry to bravura with great skill in his Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise Brilliante Op. 22. While deprived of Talon Smith‘s audition in the Quarter-Finals, I managed to hear - via live streaming - his wonderful E Minor Concerto in Sunday’s Finals. A brilliant reading technically near-perfect, nuanced in touch and tone, expressive but never sentimental.

The first to play after the lunch break was Evren Ozel, whose F Minor Ballade Op. 52 No. 4 took my breath away with beautiful sound, rhythmic energy, cantilena that headed toward its climaxes without interruption, and a pianissimo unsurpassed in this contest.

As the late-in-life daughter-in-law of Arthur Friedheim, who was both a student of Franz Liszt and a legendary pianist of the early 20th century, I have a special interest in the Peabody Conservatory because its music library is named for him. The last contestant before the break, Min Joo Yi, is a graduate student at Peabody. Her Quarter-Finals made a strong and positive impression. Next to play, Dominic Muzzi, one of only two native Floridian, launched his program with sure-fire if slightly perfunctory confidence. Unfortunately I didn’t hear Athena Tsianos, the final pianist of the day.

The Semi-Finals Feb. 25

The Semi-Finals not only test the contestants’ grasp of Chopin’s musical language, its idiomatic  “Polishness” of one kind of rubato for Mazurkas, a different one for the Ballades, and yet another in the Polonaises. Even more, the Semi-Finals test the endurance required to play sixty minutes of music in one stretch after having already played several hours of Chopin in the past four days. Treacherous stuff.

Eighteen-year-old Avery Gagliano met all of these expectations and more. Every inch a musician, she consistently demonstrated a  maturity way beyond her years in finding the balance between Chopin’s spirit and her own musical sensibilities. While both programs I heard at this competition resonated, her B Flat Minor Sonata Op. 35, No. 2 actually wove a  spell right from the beginning. A quixotic work, unpredictable, with structural freedom and wide-ranging drama, its four movements challenge the performer both technically and musically in revolutionary ways (for its time). Gagliano addressed the challenges with the musical intelligence, nobility and dignity of an artist.

Tuesday’s sessions opened auspiciously with Alexander Agate, whose Variation on “La ci darem la mano” - from Mozart’s Don Giovanni - was the only performance of this work in the competition. Chopin wrote it as a crowd pleaser, and a crowd pleaser it was. Agate dispatched it with real panache, seemingly unaware of its technical pitfalls. Next to play was Chelsea Guo. Some pianists are most comfortable with larger forms, and others favor miniatures. The 24 Preludes belong to the latter, a set of short self-contained pieces each conveying a specific idea or emotion.  Pianist and musical aficianado David Dubal calls them “small miracles”. Chelsea Guo proved herself a sensitive and poetic interpreter. The morning session ended triumphantly with Chanel Wang and the youngest but by no means least musically mature 16-year-old Parker Van Ostrand. After the break, Misha Galant, a pianist whose Mazurkas Op. 30 I admired as much as any in recent memory, for their beauty of sound, elegance, and separate but equal personalities all within a controlled sense of rubato.

Regrettably, I missed the last two pianists, Anastasia Magamadova and Daniel Szefer.

But just think. In less than two days I had the singular privilege of listening to some of the country’s most promising artists in one continuous concert at a wonderful Miami venue. It doesn’t get much better than that. Now, on to Warsaw!