Fate

Maybe it’s fate or just coincidence, but we’d watched an episode of Kenneth Clarke’s BBC documentary, Civilisation, just the night before with the title “The worship of nature”. Then on Sunday we heard Janusz Olejniczak playing Chopin. The connection is Romanticism, of course. Olejniczak did a truly excellent job in presenting Chopin in a way that made this romantic sensibility meaningful to me. I’d heard Chopin and even played some waltzes in schoolboy piano lessons, but this was a new awakening. Somewhat like Rousseau himself, whose first profound experience of being one with nature was described by Kenneth Clarke as a formative moment for Romanticism. Kenneth Clarke also described the Romantic movement as quasi-religious*, replacing a European religious belief that was battered by science and the Enlightenment with an awareness and oneness with our natural surroundings, a new respect for the mundane (meaning earthly rather than uninteresting) and a reigniting of passion and emotions in place of classical intellect and self-control. Olejniczak’s Chopin was all these things. He played so delicately at times, raising individual fingers to form notes and massaging keys while notes played and suspending time with breathless delays. The waltzes and mazurkas and ballades were delightful and the nocturnes and scherzos were exploratory, but the Polonaises were impassioned. They had the marching, the loss, the grief that was open-hearted and fully vented. Powerful, full-handed music with block chords hammering up and down the keyboard as the awe of the Romantics joined with the angst of the nationalist.

Olejniczak performed at little notice. Apparently the original performer’s wife was taken ill, and Olejniczak, who was here to judge the Chopin competition, agreed to perform for the opening concert. He even played the same repertoire, but then they seemed pretty well-known pieces. It was dignified but emotionally rich concert that was received warmly by the Polish community and Chopin followers. There was a little mushiness in big chords. We moved back after the interval and although the music was clearer and more balanced at a distance, I missed the immediacy and involvement of the third row. But what miserable concerns! This is emotional music of wonderful inventiveness and at times awe-inspiring passion that was played with lucidity and authentic Polish authority. It was a memorable outing.

Janusz Olejniczak performed Chopin solo piano pieces at the Llewellyn Hall as the opening concert for the first Australian International Chopin Piano Competition.

* Summary of The Worship of Nature (Kenneth Clarke, Civilisation, ep.11): “Belief in the divinity of nature, Clark argues, usurped Christianity’s position as the chief creative force in Western civilisation and ushered in the Romantic movement. Here Clark visits Tintern Abbey, the Alps, and there discusses the landscapes of Turner and Constable.”