Surprise: Poles win Chopin contest

David K. Nelson says:

Years ago I had the opportunity to attend an informal “house concert” here in Milwaukee featuring Ton Koopman on, of course, a splendid harpsichord. He played and talked about many things, often in response to questions some of which were as so often happens designed to elicit a hoped-for response, one which from time to time Koopman would deliberately confound: Landowska’s Pleyel harpsichord (which the questioner and other harpsichordists present all detested but which, he pointed out, must be considered an “authentic” instrument for the works written for her) and the probably misleading still photos taken of Landowska’s rather unusual claw-like hand position on the keyboard, which he surmised was posed to in part confuse and confound those who would attempt to copy it. Anyway….

One of his most interesting points, and one which he seemed to have spent some time thinking about, was the entire issue of just how long did it take for the harpsichord to be entirely replaced by the piano as an instrument for home music making? And he concluded that it took some time, well into the 19th century. Part of his evidence is the sheer number of nicely preserved harpsichords there still are. There is also the publishing convention, which again lasted well into Beethoven’s time, of publishing genuine piano music as for “… or harpsichord.” Some Beethoven sonatas for keyboared and violin were published that way. What the harpsichordist was to make of hairpin dynamics … well eventually they likely WOULD order a piano because the music was dictating it long before the harpsichord itself had become played-out from use.

Anyway Koopman made the point that it is thus not unthinkable to imagine home music makers as playing Chopin, or at least certain Chopin, on a harpsichord. And although he was writing about the music itself, not the instruments used, Charles Rosen writes in The Classical Style that the Chopin Concertos were published with a continuo part — “this persistence of an old-fashioned notation” which as he further points out, creates actual textual challenges for the soloist: is it a note to be played, or a continue cue to be an unheard aid to performance? Chopin might never himself have played on a harpsichord, but it is likely he knew people who owned one and still played on it. Rosen posits that Chopin’s ornamentation and notions of sonata form were likely informed by being in Poland and thus surrounded by a world of music making that was not on the cutting edge of changes in style. It is not hard to imagine such a world as also not being on the cutting edge of changes in the “hardware” of music.

One could make the point that the opening of the Raindrop prelude would sound even wetter on harpsichord for example.

Liam Foggerty says:

The instruments sound like the saloon pianos in Westerns like “Silverado” or “Tombstone”.