Nice line, but baloney of course.

That's great news Mr. MOCHOROWSKI!!!?!??! That's quite interesting Mark! Nice to know a tiny bit more about you!

Best of luck with the contest and I do hope to see you live (BTW, Poland is not far from Greece... Why not come over for a few days? as a hard earned vacation?)

Hey Nikolas, welcome to the thread!

Yes, that's me -- and it would be great if you could come.

Dr. Kallberg paid a great visit to this thread on Pianist Corner, about the late Mazurka in F minor, Op. 68 #4.

I'm sorry to say that although I'd heard Rubinstein's recording of 68/4 numerous times, I'd never paid enough attention to that piece to realize that it had an extra section compared to the editions I had! Now I have the National Edition, so I have the version Rubinstein played. Which has been around since I was 5. Sheesh.

Spending time with "my" harpsichord has got me wondering again whether Chopin ever played Scarlatti, and if so, what he thought of his work. To the best of my knowledge, we have no written record of Chopin giving any opinions about that. There is only a reference in the fake Delfina letters, as far as I know. I have no direct information on this myself, either. Jeff, or anyone?

Elene

Fairly OT, though there is a link to "Fryderyk Chopin's Poland":
Poland bans Monsanto GMO corn

More intelligence there than in the US at the moment. Go Poland.

Elene

This week's 'Building a Library' slot on BBC Radio 3 featured Chopin's Mazurkas. For those that don't know it, 'Building a Library' is a weekly feature on Radio 3's 'CD Review' programme in which one of their regular panel of critics, musicians and academics gives a personal survey of the available recordings of a particular work, and recommendations for your library. The great thing about it is that it is available as a podcast, and that the podcasts stay up on the website indefinitely.

This week the quirky but wonderful David Owen Norris surveyed recordings of the Mazurkas. Here's the link

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/bal

Thank you very much - I'd missed that.

Yeh, thanks.

A couple of days ago I took a Duncan dance class, that is, based on the work of Isadora Duncan, one of the inventors of modern dance. Most of the music was Chopin, with a little Schubert, Schumann and Mozart thrown in. Isadora particularly used the mazurkas, I'm told, though not with actual mazurka steps. We danced to a mazurka or two and a couple of waltzes, plus 25/1, something it might not have occurred to me to choreograph. The teacher provided filmy tunics to go over our tank tops, so that we looked rather like a collection of animated Greek statues, though perhaps less well-proportioned.

It was SO hard to stand still and listen to what we were supposed to do next while mazurkas and waltzes were playing!

Elene

In the movie "Loves of Isadora," she dances to Chopin's Waltz in A-flat, Op. 42. It brought the piece to life for me more than ever before -- and I immediately went and started learning it.

P.S. Love the "perhaps less well-proportioned" part!
(Including the exact right placement of the hyphen.)

Of course it's not hard to be perhaps-less-well-proportioned than Greek statues, and therefore no crime.

(And I think that's how we do the hyphenation in this slightly-different construction!)

I don't know anything about this guy, but I really enjoyed his performance of Chopin's 2nd sonata!!

Who is he, and how did you happen to come across him?

(BTW, I listened to some of it, and I agree.)

I was just searching for recordings of it on YouTube, and just clicked on it. The username was "ClassicalUploads" so I thought it might be a big name. Turns out that I was wrong, but it's still amazing!

I know nothing about him, except his name is Carlisle Beresford. Here's a short bio on him. http://www.sipc2010.org/competitors.html