Absolute focus
Kate Chisholm
You can almost hear the whispering through the ether. A whole weekend devoted to Chopin? Whatever was Roger Wright, Radio Three’s controller, thinking of? The Polish-born composer was only 39 when he died of TB in 1849. And he only ever really wrote for the piano. Surely there’s not enough music to fill 24 hours, let alone 48. His Preludes, Etudes, Barcarolles and Mazurkas are performed by every aspiring concert pianist, and rehashed for any promotion that demands a slushy, sentimental underscore. Do we really need a Radio Three Chopin Experience?
But Wright’s on a mission. His station is evolving away from a more rigid kind of scheduling to a broader blend of musical genres with some stunningly effective speech radio. Former fans of the station have complained bitterly about the reduction in the number of live performances, while the deletion of some of the more avant-garde programmes such as Mixing It have led to suggestions that the station is trying to be more populist. But sometimes surprising meanings, new understandings can be found through absolute focus. Chopin and nothing else. It’s like Yves Klein using only one colour to explore the meaning of blue, or Alice Munro distilling her craft by writing only short stories. Such a narrow range creates quite different insights by virtue of its concentration. Chopin and nothing else might have turned off those with a confirmed dislike of his particular musical language, but those who stuck with it will have benefited from a weekend masterclass on how to listen to music from some of the best minds in the business.
One of the advantages of there not being quite enough music to fill the hours was that there were lots of documentary features with a Chopin flavour, putting the music in context and deepening our understanding of the work. On The Early Music Show (Saturday), Catherine Bott went in search of the pianos Chopin had played while on his visits to London in 1847 and 1848. The Pleyel which he brought with him to London is now in the Cobbe collection of instruments at Hatchlands in Surrey. It was actually an old-fashioned instrument, Bott explained, but Chopin preferred its lighter sound to the more modern concert grands. Unlike Liszt, he didn’t play in public and so didn’t need to reach the cheap seats at the back of a large concert hall.
Bott’s guest was the pianist Peter Katin, who played a Chopin Barcarolle on the Pleyel at Hatchlands, but also gave us a Nocturne from a Broadwood, reckoned to be the English equivalent. It was fascinating to hear how different the two pianos sounded, but also to recognise the inwardness, the veiled quality of the music. Not at all Romantic. As Anthony Storr, the psychiatrist, said on Michael Berkeley’s special ‘Chopin’ edition of Private Passions on Sunday, ‘It pulls out of one thoughts and feelings that one did not know one had.’ An echo of what Daniel Barenboim wrote in the Guardian last week when he revealed that his teacher in Paris, Nadia Boulanger, had insisted that when he was playing he should ‘think with his heart and feel with his intellect’. This seems to me to describe exactly the sensation of listening to Chopin’s Nocturnes. It’s as if Chopin is actually talking to himself, uttering the deepest thoughts about life but through the medium of a language that is not fixed but can be interpreted by the individual listener.
Also on Private Passions was William Hague, who we discovered took up learning to play the piano on the day that he resigned as leader of the Conservative party. ‘It changed my brain,’ he said, ‘my whole mind.’ He chose one of Chopin Preludes (Opus. 28, No. 20 in C minor) because he had learnt to play it, which struck me as a wonderfully imaginative response to what he confessed was a big setback. ‘When you’ve had a big discontinuity in your career — that wasn’t planned for — suddenly to develop your mind in new ways is very satisfying,’ he revealed.
Cherie Blair, of course, turned not to music but to writing up her memoirs when she fell from her place as Britain’s ‘First Lady’ (as she likes to think of herself). This week you will have been able to hear her reading from her own book, Speaking for Myself. But if you’re quick you’ll be able to Listen Again to her interview with Jenni Murray for Woman’s Hour. What shook me was not the ‘titillating revelations’ about sex in Balmoral but the dismissive way she recalled her friendship with Carole Caplin — ‘She provided a very good service for me.’ She also left me gasping with disbelief when she ended by describing her life as ‘the story of a girl who started off living in Waterloo in Liverpool and ended up with a ringside seat on history’. Who needs Alastair Campbell?
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