Word: chopines
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Nazis forbade Polish music, so Wasowski played clandestinely in basements for handfuls of Poles who risked their lives to hear Chopin's familiar polonaises and nocturnes. Says Wasowski: "I think it was then I found Chopin's soul." Once at Warsaw he watched from his window a mass execution of 23 Poles. "I saw them placed against walls-eyes bound. They calmly sang the Polish national hymn. Madness seized me. I rushed to the rickety piano which was placed in the back room, and I accompanied them. I suppose they can't have heard me, because...
...Nazis wanted him to tour Germany, playing "anything but Chopin." When he refused, they put him into a work battalion digging trenches. One night he ran away ("Thank God I have long legs"), was smuggled into Austria to join the Polish colony in Vienna. He played Chopin for music-loving Austrians in Salzburg's Mozarteum, Vienna's Musikvereins-Saal. After a private recital in Rome an impresario arranged Andre's first public concert. It was a sellout...
What most impresses critics is the way Wasowski soft-pedals Chopin's sentimental lyricism, to stress the vitality and militancy of the music. Says Andre: "In my conviction, Chopin is not a sentimentalist. On the contrary when I am at the piano I feel his power and anguished revolutionary might." After a series of concerts in Rome, Wasowski will play in Amsterdam. To any American he meets, he says: "How can I get to the United States...
...Lenny Bernstein's New York City Symphony playing the new music that the older conductors ignore. They crowded into recitals by Singers Marian Anderson, Carol Brice and Giuseppe De Luca; concerts by Pianists John Kirkpatrick and Alexander Brailowsky (who in six programs is playing every solo piano piece Chopin wrote). There were folk songs and ballads, American songs by Tom Scott, South African veld songs by Josef Marais, and jive concerts all over the place...
Thanks to Arthur Rubinstein's recording of the sound tract, the thirty-eight versions of the Concerto and of some Chopin and Wagner all sound at their brilliant best. But forty-seven hearings of a work, part of which was identified by latter-day musicians in the audience as "Full Moon and Empty Arms," is too much for even the most insistent Raclunauaninof fan. Or maybe it was fifty...