TAMAMI HONMA - CD CHOPIN

Popis - CHOPIN:
During my time as a student with Byron Janis in New York, we studied many of Chopin's works together, encompassing all genres, both large and small. Byron Janis was a genius of expression and characterisation in all the music of Chopin. He gave the small works the respect that tends to be reserved only for the large works by many and he influenced me greatly in my interpretation. In gratitude for music and much else, I dedicate this recording to Byron Janis. Small forms... I was delighted to be asked to record a Chopin Recital devoted to his smaller works. The emerging musical Romantics undoubtedly owed some of their ideals to their literary aunts and uncles. One legacy of this was the status of the fragment as a work of art, stemming from Novalis and Jean Paul and finding musical form through Schumann and some of the Preludes by Chopin. However, the musical revolution was not unopposed. Even in our postmodernist age, there is an uneasiness, among members of the artistic profession especially, about the eminence of these Waltzes, Nocturnes, Mazurkas and other small works. How typically ironic was Chopin's pen when in a letter from Vienna he wrote, 'Here, waltzes are called works!' An article from 1835 in the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik by August Kahlert, typical of the day, represents a three-pronged attack on small forms in general, calling dance music the lowest form, implying that dramatic music is incompatible with small genres and explaining the custom of adding literary titles to musical works as being a mask to cover up empty works that have no meaning of their own. Even Schumann himself, who later attempted opera and symphony, said that Chopin's exclusive concentration on piano composition prevented him from achieving even greater heights. It is the aesthetic of the fragment - so many half-glimpsed and half-wrought visions, 'individual eagle pinions' as Schumann styled Chopin's Preludes - that is valuable to an appreciation of all Chopin's small forms. Although not strictly fragments, the Waltzes, Mazurkas and Nocturnes all share a dispersive quality with the true fragments among the Preludes. Each short work is a microcosm of expression, voice, form and technique. The epic, dramatic and lyric voices of a Chopin ballade or sonata can all find their individual articulation in the passage of a single Mazurka or Nocturne, just as the Waltz is a component of most of the large-scale works. The song... The nocturnes have a superficial affinity with the growing tradition of small-scale works popular with publishers and amateurs from the start of the nineteenth century. This association is responsible for the notion of Chopin the salon composer. However, Chopin's first published nocturne, Opus 9, No. 1, stands manifesto-like at the gateway forbidding such an interpretation with its remote and dark opening tones. The full drama is unleashed in the middle section of the last nocturne of that same set of three. Publishers of the day followed the custom of attaching poetic titles to works to promote sales. The London edition of the Opus 9 Nocturnes went under the title Murmurs of the Seine and few works by Chopin escaped such treatment. Inevitably these titles, combined with the narrative hallmarks and intensity of many of his lyrical compositions, brought about another powerful conception of Chopin as a Romantic composer. His music became a 'fragment of autobiography', in Dahlhaus' words, and Chopin's liaison with Georges Sand, the trip to Majorca, his suffering and consumptive end took on new significance for the reception of his music. Chopin himself was too classicist to support this. He did not approve of deive titles and in his extant correspondence hardly more than once gives a poetic deion of one of his own works. The dance... The Waltzes and Mazurkas mostly abandon the solid practicality of danceable music and instead elevate the spirit of dance, aspiring to the Baroque tradition of Bach. Chopin's Mazurkas tend to draw from more than one type of Polish regional dance, including the oberek and the kujawiak in addition to the characteristic holubiecs and other accents of the mazur. This elaborate mixing of genre, often perceptibly within one work, is an indication of the richness of the musical thought. Chopin's Mazurkas are also misinterpretations - in Harold Bloom's sense - of their folk models. One example is the treatment of the drones of Polish folk dance, such as the dudy or gajdy (bagpipes) or basetla or basy (unstopped string bass), which form a stable basis in the folk models. In Chopin, they sometimes function perversely to destabilise the tonic key, such as in the middle section of Opus 7, No.l. The Mazurkas partly fuel the myth of Chopin as the exiled Polish nationalist composer. As a result of the Polish folk origin and unusual modal elements of these dances, groups of listeners perceive his entire oeuvre, by association, as politically and culturally programmatic. Rubato... Eigeldinger identifies three distinct forms of rubato in Chopin - and the evidence suggests that Chopin used them all when he himself played his works. The most characteristic kind of rubato is that derived from the Italian Baroque bel canto tradition, and continued by Mozart, where the left hand maintains the pulse and the cantilena has an independent rhythmic freedom. The second kind is the more generally practised agogic fluctuation of tempo in response to phrasing, texture and dynamics. The third kind is a rhythmic signature specific to the Mazurkas, whose tradition must now sadly be regarded as lost to us. Chopin abandoned the use of the term rubato in his compositions at an early stage, no doubt because of the scope for misunderstanding and the recognition that the nature of rubato could only be communicated by demonstration. CD notes © 2001 Tamami Honma About TAMAMI HONMA, piano Tamami Honma began her career at the age of five as a prize-winner in a national competition in Tokyo, going on to make her US concerto debut at the age of seven with Mozart's Concerto in A Major, K414. After this auspicious start, she won grand and first prizes in several international competitions and has made many solo and orchestral appearances across most of the continental USA, in the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Japan, Israel, Lithuania and Russia. In Moscow's Great Hall, she performed Rachmaninov's Concerto No. 7 with the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra. Tamami Honma studied piano over a four-year period with legendary pianist of the Romantic generation Byron Janis - himself a student of Horowitz and the Lhevinnes - in New York and thereafter with Christopher Elton at the Royal Academy of Music, London. She now lectures on and co-ordinates the Piano Literature Course at the Royal Academy of Music, a course which she founded in 1998. An article by Tamami Honma on Beethoven performance was recently published in Arietta, Volume II (Autumn 2000 edition) and she was appointed as editor of the Liszt Society Journal in 2001. Commercial CD recordings of Tamami Honma's playing demonstrate an eclectic approach and a refreshingly diverse focus, including a disc of Mozart sonatas with violinist Howard Davis (leader of the Alberni Quartet), also for DK Music Ltd, and discs of contemporary British chamber works by McCabe, Rawsthorne and Nigel Clarke on Metier. Both Metier recordings received five stars in BBC Music Magazine and the Clarke CD also received high acclaim in Gramophone magazine. Tamami Honma's concert appearances around the world have included radio and television broadcasts with distinguished chamber partners. She has recently been featured on Lithuanian radio and television with the Vilnius String Quartet as part of the Gaida 2000 Festival in Vilnius, and on Polish Radio during the Autumn Festival 1999 in Warsaw with the acclaimed Kreutzer Quartet. Tamami Honma has also played with violinist Peter Sheppard-Skaerved, leader of the Kreutzer Quartet, cellist Mats Lidstrom, and for a period as repetiteur for Teresa Stratas of the New York Metropolitan Opera. US television broadcasts have featured solo music by Ravel and Haydn's F Major Concerto, while her accounts of Chopin's F Minor Concerto, Grieg's Concerto and Rachmaninov's Second Concerto were broadcast on US Radio KBYU-FM. Tamami Honma has organised a number of notable musical events in London. She co-organised the Beethoven Day (1998) with guests Dr. William Kinderman and BBC television news presenter/author John Suchet, combining a sequence of presentations and concerts at the Royal Academy of Music. She followed this by organizing (in conjunction with the Lithuanian Embassy) New Lithuanian Music and Art: A Closer Look (1999), an evening uniquely combining a concert of recent Lithuanian music with an exhibition of Lithuanian art, also at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 2001, she was Musical Coordinator of a project to put on a three-day festival of Lithuanian music and presentations being held at both the London College of Music and Royal Academy of Music.