Chopin: Piano Sonatas 2 and 3 and Mazurkas – Ivo Pogorelich, Garrick Ohlsson

Frederic Chopin (1810 – 1849)

Live Recordings From Chopin Competition, Warsaw, Poland – 1992

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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:

The disc is part of a series called ‘Great Chopin Performers’ – I agree… these are great performances.

LINER NOTES – No One Credited

Ivo Pogorelich was born in 1958 in Belgrade. His name hit the headlines of the world’s press overnight when there was an uproar on his account at the 10th International Chopin Competition in 1980; after a majority of the over twenty jury members did not wish, on account of his unconventional Chopin playing to let him through to the final round.

Martha Argerich walked out of the jury in protest. Instead of a prize, Pogorelich was given an honorable mention as an ‘extraordinarily original pianistic talent.’

Yet since then the Warsaw ‘non-prizewinner,’ who previously had gained first prizes in the Casagrande Competition in Italy and in Montreal, has been among the most discussed and sought after pianists of the young generation.

Since the age of 11, Pogorelich received his training in Moscow, where he attended first the Central Music School and later the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. But particularly important for his artistic development was the pianist Alice Kezeradze, whom he married in 1980.

Pogorelich’s piano playing is distinguished by sensitivity, suble tonal gradations and a tendency to the polarization of contrasts; it is thus clearly different from the dominating ‘classical’ post-war Chopin style.

Garrick Ohlsson was the first American to emerge from the Warsaw Chopin Competition as winner of the gold medal. He was first prize winner in 1970 after already winning the Busoni Competition in Bolzano four years earlier and the Montreal contest in 1968.

Ohlsson, born in Bronxville (USA) in 1948, studied at the Julliard School in New York with Sascha Gorodnitzki and Rosina Lhevinne as well as Olga Barabini.

Thanks to extraordinary pianistic talent and musical formation initially, at times, seemingly somewhat impersonal or ‘sportive,’ perhaps, but perfectly well=balanced, he was quickly able to gain successes, and today is among the most notable US pianists of the middle generation.

Chopin’s Piano Sonatas

After seeral early attempts at multi-movement sonata form – the Op. 4 Piano Sonata of 1828, the Op. 8 Piano Trio of 1829 and the two piano concertos, Op. 11 and 21, of 1830 – Chopin in later years returned three more times to the main classical musical form, namely in his two Piano Sonatas, Op, 35 and 58, and the ‘late’ Cello Sonata, Op. 65.

He wrote the sonata in B-flat Minor, Op. 35 in 1839 round the famous Funderal March (which dates from two years earlier) as centerpiece. It is a sequence of character movements of extremely terse profile, which Chopin put together without special regard to the form balance of the movements to each other; the famous pianissimo Finale with its whilring unison running passages, for example, forms no real counterweight to the striking first movement of the Sonata.

Chopin’s B Minor Sonata, Op. 58 of summer 1844 is more balanced in form, more concerto-like in style and large-scale in layout but, particularly, in the first movement, more conventional in tone.