Vote for the best Chopin recording

If you play the piano, if you listen to the piano, it’s hard to ignore Frédéric Chopin. No classical composer of any merit, before or since, has devoted himself so exclusively to music for the keyboard as the early 19th-century pianist and composer, the subject of this weekend’s orgy that is BBC Radio 3’s Chopin Experience.

Over two days every note that Chopin wrote and published – the sonatas, the preludes, the mazurkas, waltzes, nocturnes polonaises, the two concertos, the bits and pieces – will be broadcast. Every other note will be discussed. Every strain and kink of his short, eventful life, from a child prodigy’s whirl in Poland to the closeted salons of Paris and his death from tuberculosis in 1849, at the age of 39, will be isolated and weighed.

Is the man worth this much fuss? In principle, yes. Chopin may not have had any imitators, but that’s only because his individuality as a composer is so strong. His melodies curl about and stick in the mind like no one else’s. His harmonies waft a pungent perfume all their own, and invite you into an imaginative, mercurial world unique in music history.

True, he wrote no epic symphonies, no operas, no oratorios, no sacred passions – none of the period’s usual outlets for lofty musical thoughts. But he used his preferred short forms with such a degree of innovation and imagination that even people who feel distaste at his music’s emotional atmosphere respect Chopin for his craft.

Well, not everyone respects him. In a 1981 radio interview the notoriously eccentric Canadian pianist Glenn Gould brashly announced that Chopin (and Liszt and Schu-bert) “had no idea of how to write for the piano”. On another occasion, Gould called Chopin “not a very good composer”. Heavens above, you might think, if those keyboard composers couldn’t get past Gould’s pearly gates who could?

Such idiosyncratic opinions should not be rejected completely. Chopin, for all his wide popularity, remains a complex, often misunderstood, figure, and if this weekend’s bonanza helps us to peer into his many-sided character and find a man who wrote much more than pretty music, the world will be a better place.

The truth is, Chopin is a tricky customer. Even pianists in full sympathy with him approach his music with some trepidation. The British pianist Stephen Hough, the veteran of a fine CD of the Ballades, declares his music to be so fearfully perfect, so polished, lacking a single ugly bar, that “if a piece doesn’t naturally sound beautiful it can only be the performer’s fault”.

For Simon Trpceski, responsible for one of the most volcanic of recent CD Chopin recitals, playing this composer also carries risks. “There’s a Macedonian saying,” he says, “about going with your hat to break a wall.” And we should remember Tamás Vásáry’s comment to Jeremy Siepmann in the 1990s about Chopin leaving nowhere to hide. “With Chopin,” he said, “you often feel quite naked.”

A naked pianist: it’s a frightening thought. Yet the image somehow seems appropriate for a composer who seems to have put every tremor of his life into the stream of music that diligently poured from his brain, no matter what. He was bothered by his precarious health; by an almost pathological fear of public contact; by intermittent money worries; by a restless heart that came closest to peace during his ten-year liaison with the novelist George Sand, Europe’s scandalous lady in trousers.

Chopin’s world is an enclosed, hothouse world, heavy with poignant regret and aching sadness, and the world doesn’t suit everybody.

“He had such a distinctive voice,” Hough explains, “and his character is laid out in front of you in his music. I think some German-trained pianists in particular feel uncomfortable getting into that character.”

This might partly explain the attitude of Alfred Brendel. This great pianist hasn’t given Chopin the total cold shoulder during his performing career (you’ll find an LP from 1968, recorded in Vienna). But he’s long taken the line that, admirable and unique composer though he may be, Chopin is best left to the Chopin specialists. Maybe the open emotion jars with Brendel’s intellect.

András Schiff, another thinking pianist, has had his own off-and-on relationship with the composer. He dropped him from his repertoire for years until he worked himself back into the music playing the softer-toned Pleyel pianos of Chopin’s own time. After researching his subject for a biographical film, Schiff found another hurdle: Chopin’s personal character. Not sympathetic.

Chopin’s life and image, it’s true, can easily become a burden. Through gossip, newspaper reports and the miasmas of fiction he emerged from the 19th-century’s collective memory as someone to senti-mentalise: the suffering Romantic artist, unlucky in love, unlucky in health, coughing blood on to the piano keys, like Cornel Wilde at the end of that rotten but amusing Hollywood film A Song to Remember. His music across the years has been chopped up, doused with sugar and plastered with words for Tin Pan Alley songs or Broadway musicals. He’s been murdered by tinklers in many hotel lounges.

Even serious pianists, such as Chopin’s fellow Pole Paderewski, used to garland his melodies with tears and outrageous rubato, enough to bring on sickness. The preferred modern tactic now is to fight off overexaggeration and match Chopin’s romantic agony with the classical poise of a composer in love with Bach, Mozart, inner harmonies and the clear dance of polyphony – an element certainly strong in Chopin’s make-up. “A good balance between his romantic soul and his classical expression is one of the most difficult things to achieve,” says the wise Ingrid Fliter, soloist in EMI’s most recent Chopin disc.

Stephen Hough now spies a new danger: interpretations so desperate to avoid tears that pianists opt for a steely sound quite unlike what Chopin wanted or knew. Glenn Gould, if he gave himself a proper chance, would no doubt have pulled Chopin in that direction.

But why waste time on speculation? There are enough pianists out there playing this music for good or bad, on disc, in concert, or on Radio 3, to give everyone a chance to discover what the full, the real Chopin experience is all about.

The Chopin Experience: BBC Radio 3, tomorrow and Sunday

The best of Chopin on record

Murray Perahia
Master of subtle poetry, shaping and natural ease.Ballades, Etudes, Mazurkas, Waltzes (Sony SK 64399).

Alfred Cortot
Taste the ecstasy; forget the finger slips. Ballades and Nocturnes (Naxos 8.111245).

Simon Trpceski
Fiery strength plus genuine tenderness. The Scherzos, and 2nd Piano Sonata (EMI 375 5862).

Arthur Rubinstein
Patrician playing of great beauty. Nocturnes (Naxos 8.110659/60).

Dinu Lipatti
A master of poise, grace, and the shadow behind Chopin’s smile. Waltzes (EMI CDM5 66904-2).

Which of Geoff Brown’s choices do you think is the greatest? Vote here

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010