Do you think we should view Chopin as a creator of musical sketches akin to Liszt or Debussy, even if his pieces mostly lack similarly descriptive titles?Ĭhopin was against concrete descriptive titles of his pieces, leaving the music to speak to the listener and to the performer on its own. You mention the vivid imagery conjured up by the works you’re playing here. All of this resonated very strongly with my emotional state during that time, and by playing some of the Chopin’s pieces I also felt as if I was getting closer to my parents and to my childhood, as this was the time I was working with them on so many of the pieces which ended up on the album. I always felt very connected with his spirit, his incredibly beautiful singing melodies and harmonies, the constant presence of a certain melancholy and nostalgia in his music, his tenderness and hopeless romanticism, but at the same time inner power and passion. Both of my parents are wonderful pianists and piano professors, they were my teachers for many years, and Chopin’s music always occupied a very important place in my repertoire and in my heart since I was a child. There was a personal reason for that: As I was separated with my parents for all this time without possibility to travel (they were stuck in Kiev, Ukraine, where the coronavirus situation was very bad), I was thinking and worrying about them a lot. We did many streams and online festivals, which also helped us to keep in touch with our audiences, even if only digitally.īut in terms of the time I spent at the piano alone, yes, Chopin’s music dominated.
I and my husband (Nicholas Schwartz, a double bassist with the Concertgebouw orchestra) found ourselves playing a lot of chamber music during the lockdown, which also had an almost therapeutic effect – being able to have a real live contact and make music with our friends was very important during this time. Of course Chopin was not the only composer whose music I was playing during the lockdown. Indeed, we as musicians are lucky, as even with all the restrictions and isolation we faced a year and a half ago, one thing we could never lose was music. There are plenty of composers whose music could have served this kind of “therapeutic” function – what drew you particularly to Chopin? Like many people over the past eighteen difficult months, you’ve found comfort in music.
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