Chopin Polonaise-Fantaisie

Rubens

Friends,

Since I am migrating to this forum, allow me to share past recordings that I previously published on PW. I am sharing two recordings of the same piece, on my current piano and on my former piano.

The Polonaise-Fantaisie is a long and complex piece that is certainly NOT the best to showcase a pianist's abilities, but I'm not here for that!

Here is the recording on my current piano, from last year. The piano is a Baldwin SD-10, built in 1978, restored recently. I'm not entirely happy with my interpretation, I find it to be too marcato, perhaps too "masculine" for Chopin. Still, I managed to win top prize at an amateur competition with this. Pardon the suboptimal sound quality of the recording:

And here is the same piece played in 2022 on my former piano, a baby grand Pease from 1911, refurbished recently. You can hear that the instrument could not stay in tune. I didn't submit this performance to any competition, but I think it actually had more emotion than my other performance:

Comments welcome!

keff

Rubens Bravo. Wonderful playing. I found your performance on the Pease the most compelling to listen to.

Rubens

keff Thanks keff. I'm glad to see that maybe all my work in refurbishing the Pease's action did something good. I sold it to my son's school two years ago. For a year they barely touched it, which led me to wonder if they regretted acquiring the instrument. It turns out they were waiting for their other piano (an old broken Steinway O) to become completely unusable before they start using the Pease, which is actually what happened this year. The Pease is now in their little concert hall.

SouthPark

Both recordings sound excellent Rubens. Thoroughly enjoyed both 2022 and 2023. It takes us to very special place!!! It sounds and feels excellent. The recording system did an excellent job too to capture that.

Rubens

SouthPark The recording system did an excellent job too to capture that.

Thanks SP. I wish I could have recorded my current piano with the same settings as I did with the Pease. Ran out of time because I had to submit my entry to the competition (I found out about the competition near its deadline).

SouthPark

Rubens I wish I could have recorded my current piano with the same settings as I did with the Pease. Ran out of time because I had to submit my entry to the competition (I found out about the competition near its deadline).

That's ok! A nice thing is you got a very well deserved award for that effort. Excellent effort, and thanks for sharing the recordings again. Fantastic to be hearing the music in the safety and luxury of this new PTell forum and area!

Josephine

Thanks for sharing this Rubens, I enjoyed both performances a lot. I think I heard it before, maybe in the pw recital? I agree that the emotion is maybe a little bit different when you played it on the Pease piano. Congratulations for winning the top prize in the competition.

twocats

I only listened to the Pease recording and I bet it was a lovely old piano. It was a nice performance!

Rubens

twocats
Thanks for your kind words!
I have to admit the Pease recording was edited. Mea culpa.
I think the Baldwin one was more satisfying overall, despite not being edited (competition rules!). But I do prefer the way I played the big ending climax on the Pease. Bigger, felt almost Wagnerian when I played it. Never managed to replicate the feeling after that. In the other performance I was too anxious at that spot to slow down as much as I would have liked to. Oh well.

twocats

Rubens I didn't notice the editing 🙂

It's so stressful to record a long piece like that, because if you mess up you have to start over!

Rubens

twocats
When I record and I know I can't edit, I have to put myself in live performance mode, which means I have to convince myself that "wrong' notes don't matter, as long as it sounds good. Instead of wrong notes I want to think of them as extra notes. If it happens I just continue and I tell myself I'm a bard, the piano is my lyre, I'm just improvising this music, and this is how I want it to sound, with those extra notes and all. And yet it is still nerve racking! I'd be lying if I said that that first wrong/extra note at 4:04 into the Baldwin performance didn't bother me at all.

twocats

Rubens that's the real reason there's so few recordings on my YouTube channel. It's so hard to get a good take with the recorder "watching" you and it's so stressful! My other private videos were live performances (haha on one of them my page turner flipped two pages forward instead of one... and then later in an unrelated section I botched a phrase that was one of my favorite musical moments, that I had never messed up on before!) so no re-dos!

Jane

Rubens

I'm just improvising this music, and this is how I want it to sound,

The most vivid experience of this I had was when I awoke one 2AM in the distant past. I still occasionally partook of the wacky weed in those years, and had a few puffs before donning the earphones and sitting at my piano.
I played the Berceuse.

Well, I didn't play it. I watched my hands, and it was as if they belonged to Chopin and he was improvising the most marvelous music. There was no concern about hitting a wrong note. The only thing I did was to listen and work the pedal.

The problem I think so many of us have is the self-consciousness that flits our thoughts AROUND the music that we're TRYING to play. As the green puppet once said, "Do or do not. There is no try." When we're thinking about ourselves or whether we're going to play the next section cleanly or dealing with the slings and arrows, we're disconnected. What I think differentiates the pros from so many of us is their incredible level of concentration.

Rubens

Jane
That's exactly the kind of experience I'm looking for every time I perform!
But preferably without weed🤣. Btw thank you for the kind words you just sent me on the other side♥️.

Jane

Yes, I said I find your Polonaise-Fantaisie very impressive. Just the facts, sir 😉