Chopin: Berceuse - Koczalski, 1928

Chopin Berceuse in Db, op 57 Koczalski, 1928 Thanks to Rolf for allowing me to use his excellent transfers. You can find this and many other wonderful selections and information at his website: http://satyr78kl.blogspot.nl/ Bio edited to fit YT’s absurd limitations. Raoul Koczalski’s first piano lessons were from his mother, but he changed teachers to Julian Gadowski. He then made his debut at the age of four in 1888 at a private salon in Warsaw and immediately embarked on a tour of Russia, playing sixty concerts between September 1888 and April 1889. During the tour he met and played for Anton Rubinstein who was greatly impressed. Koczalski was, of course, a child prodigy, and by the age of seven had composed forty-six works; at the age of eleven, by which time he was playing the standard repertoire of Chopin and Liszt, he had given over one thousand concerts. Aged nine, he had conducted his own Légende Symphonique in Berlin and Leipzig and was playing the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ Sonata Op. 53 in recital, a reviewer referring to the fact that Koczalski had studied it with Hans von Bülow. In 1891 Koczalski had lessons with Ludwig Marek a few months before his death. Marek was a pupil of Liszt and Mikuli, and upon his death Koczalski studied for four summers with Karl Mikuli himself (1821–1897), a pupil of Chopin. Every aspect of playing the piano was addressed by Mikuli: ‘Strictly based on Chopin’s method, his teaching was so revolutionary that even today it commands all my admiration…’ Koczalski went on to say that Mikuli stressed above all ‘…the care for authenticity with which Chopin’s works must be approached. Here there is no camouflage, no cheap rubato and no languishing or useless contortions.’ On 10 May 1893 the eight-year-old Koczalski ‘…who has created so great a sensation in Berlin, Vienna and other continental cities’ made his debut in London and by 21. In 1895 he gave five recitals of Chopin’s music in Paris where critics favourably compared him to Anton Rubinstein. Koczalski made the transition from wunderkind to finished artist remarkably well. During his teens he was appointed court pianist to the Shah of Persia. A critic wrote, ‘M. Koczalski is a player of quite exceptional powers (he can do with a Chopin scale or ornament what only Pachmann at his best could do with it)… it soon became clear that he is no more superior to the gloss on the text or the pitfalls of personal interpretation than other performers are. His are different from those of other performers, but often quite as unlike what Chopin wrote.’ After World War II Koczalski returned to Poland where he was professor at the National Music School in Poznań. In October 1947 he played for the first time after the war in Warsaw and chose Chopin’s E minor Piano Concerto Op. 11. The following year he made preparations for the centenary of Chopin’s death but after concerts in Berlin, Dresden, Zürich and Munich, he gave his last concert in Poznań in November 1948. He left 150 published works including three operas, six piano concertos, a violin concerto, chamber music, eight piano sonatas and twenty-four préludes dedicated to the memory of Chopin. After his lessons with Mikuli, Koczalski had no other teacher and it may be true to say that Koczalski’s recordings of Chopin are the closest we shall hear to the style the composer envisaged. He recorded much of the Polish composer’s output including the complete études, préludes and ballades, three of the impromptus, some nocturnes, polonaises and the B flat minor Scherzo. The most notable feature of Koczalski’s playing is its clarity and transparency. It is the opposite of the Leschetizky school of arm-weight and big tone production. In the études he plays with very little sustaining pedal. He does not play the études as vehicles for display, nor as exercises, but plays them as music. The later recording of Chopin’s Berceuse Op. 57 is a model of delicacy and clearly demonstrates Mikuli’s stricture for no cheap rubato or languishing, whilst the recording of the Nocturne in E flat Op. 9 No. 2 is of particular interest as it contains ‘authentic variants’, apparently written into Mikuli’s score by Chopin himself. — Jonathan Summers