{"id":723,"date":"2009-06-25T10:22:31","date_gmt":"2009-06-25T10:22:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2009\/06\/25\/chopin-as-prophet\/"},"modified":"2009-06-25T10:22:31","modified_gmt":"2009-06-25T10:22:31","slug":"chopin-as-prophet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2009\/06\/25\/chopin-as-prophet\/","title":{"rendered":"Chopin as prophet"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Pianist<\/em>, based on Wladyslaw Szpilman<\/a>\u2018s memoirs and reimagined in words and music by the Russian pianist Mikhail Rudy<\/a>, has been enjoying a two-week run at the Royal Exchange Theatre as part of the Manchester Festival, where it won a prize two years ago when presented experimentally in a warehouse attic. I\u2019ve just been to see it, and no way could I sleep afterwards, so I have been up writing this much of the night\u2026 <\/p>\n

Rudy at the piano twins with gravelly-voiced actor Peter Guinness in representing Szpilman himself. With sparse and immaculate direction by Neil Bartlett, the pair bring to life the now-famous story of the pianist\u2019s survival against all odds in the wartime Warsaw Ghetto<\/a>. The music includes two pieces by Szpilman himself but mainly consists of Chopin \u2013 whose works may never sound the same again to anyone who witnesses this.<\/p>\n

The story is, of course, quite powerful enough alone, and the audience is, broadly speaking, a theatre crowd rather than a classical music one \u2013 and many of us were moved to tears throughout. As Benedict Nightingale said in his five-star review<\/a> for The Times<\/em> the other day, it makes our own problems seem pretty pathetic. But the way that Rudy has integrated choice extracts of Chopin to match the chosen texts is nothing short of phenomenal. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve often felt that Chopin is a master of the dark arts: if he glimpses heaven, it\u2019s through the prism of hell. The popular image of him as precious, feeble and consumptive says much about the physical malady that hampered him for most of his short adult life, but nothing whatever about his creative soul. His aural visions, if you\u2019ll pardon the mixed metaphor, are the stuff of nightmare, frequently more avant-garde even than his sometime rival, Franz Liszt. Rudy has found a way to show us those terrifying visions personified. In this light, Chopin is not only \u2018dark\u2019: he becomes a prophet of the apocalypse. <\/p>\n

Take the case of the orphanage director who chose to go to his death with his charges, to ease for them the horror of what lay ahead. Even in the gas chamber, Szpilman suggests, this compassionate man would have been trying to spare the children the fear that accompanies the transition of life into death: \u201cIt\u2019ll be all right\u2026\u201d<\/em> Enter the \u2018Raindrop\u2019 Prelude, in which one repeated note pivots the music from hope to mortal terror and, sure enough, the melody seems to sing \u201cIt\u2019ll be all right\u2026\u201d<\/em> \u2013 almost as closely as if Chopin had deliberately set to music the words of his fellow Polish pianist that would be uttered a hundred years afterwards. <\/p>\n

After Szpilman, saved by a startling intervention, has watched his parents and siblings climbing aboard the cattle trucks to be deported to their deaths, Rudy performs the first movement of Chopin\u2019s Sonata No.2 in B flat minor, the \u2018Funeral March\u2019 sonata \u2013 and, incredibly, everything is there in music: the relentless train, the frantic questioning of the prisoners within, the chaos as the meltdown begins. That sensation is so intense, with Rudy playing like a man possessed, that one could almost imagine that Chopin, the arch Pole-in-exile, had some form of psychic hotline to the 20th<\/sup> century so that the \u2018visionary\u2019 quality in his music becomes virtually prescient of what would happen to his beloved homeland a century later\u2026 Most of this sonata (but for the funeral march itself) dated from 1839. <\/p>\n

I thought I knew this music well, yet I experienced an actual physical shock as the connection of history and sound blazed to life. And I\u2019d have felt exactly the same if I\u2019d never heard a note of it before. That\u2019s where the genius of this theatrical creation lies: it restores narrative to musical performance, breaking through any perceived barriers of communication to show that they don\u2019t exist, and proving \u2013 without needing to prove anything \u2013 that art has the power to convey the vast gamut of human experience without assumption, point-proving or condescension: just by existing at the best level. <\/p>\n

This show \u2013 one pianist, one actor, a piano, a chair and some lights \u2013 played for four months in Paris, has been performed around the world in ten languages and has won powerful acclaim everywhere from Manchester to Sydney. But it hasn\u2019t yet been seen in London. Here\u2019s a plea to London theatres: 2010 is Chopin Year, the composer\u2019s bicentenary. So take The Pianist<\/em> and let it run. You won\u2019t regret it. <\/p>\n

Three more Manchester performances, finishing Saturday. <\/a><\/p>\n

Micha and Peter kindly let me photograph them in the theatre after the show\u2026 <\/p>\n

<\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

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No related posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Pianist, based on Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoirs and reimagined in words and music by the Russian pianist Mikhail Rudy, has been enjoying a two-week run at the Royal Exchange Theatre as part of the Manchester Festival, where it won a prize two years ago when presented experimentally in a warehouse attic. I’ve just been to see it, and no way could I sleep afterwards, so I have been up writing this much of the night…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7049,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}