At the heart of the great romantic composer Frédéric Chopin’s powerful appeal to audiences for almost 200 years is the intensely emotional nature of his music. This was particularly true of the Polish composer’s first piano concerto, which he composed in 1830, when he was just 19. Its central movement was inspired by Chopin’s passion for the beautiful young opera singer Konstancja Gladkowska, which he channeled into music that is operatic in its ardor.
“What I think is remarkable about [this concerto] is the raw emotion,” said pianist Kevin Kenner, one of the world’s most renowned interpreters of Chopin’s music and a professor at the Frost School of Music, where he is also artistic director and founder of the summer Frost Chopin Academy.
Kenner will give voice to that emotion on Monday, April 19, when he plays Chopin’s “Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, Op. 21” in his debut performance with the Palm Beach Symphony. He’ll perform under the baton of acclaimed orchestral leader Maestro Gerard Schwarz, a professor at the Frost School and the Music Director of the Palm Beach Symphony. The concert is sponsored by the Park Foundation, Patrick and Milly Park.
(Although Chopin composed the F Minor Concerto first, it was published a few months after a concerto he composed subsequently, which led to the F Minor being named No. 2.)
“You can really feel what they call zal in Polish, which implies a kind of intense regret and pain which we associate with Chopin’s works,” said Kenner from Warsaw, Poland, recently, where he was a judge in the International Chopin Piano Competition. “This is experiencing that in its fullest.”
In a letter to his best friend, Tytus Wojciechowski, the young Chopin wrote that he had composed the Larghetto – the lyrical central section of the three-movement F Minor Concerto – thinking of Gladkowska.
“Perhaps to my misfortune,” Chopin wrote, “I have met my ideal and have served her faithfully for six months, without speaking to her about my feelings. I dream about it: under her inspiration, the adagio of my Concerto in F minor… [has] been born.”
And not just personally, but musically. According to Kenner, Chopin was passionate about Italian opera, which influenced his music throughout his career. In the F Minor Concerto, he combined those two loves in both feeling and form.
“The nature of the material was very operatic,” said Kenner. “It is almost as if he imagined Konstancja singing the second movement.” He compared the Larghetto to an operatic aria, with “beautiful long, luscious lines” and the dramatic sweep and achingly lovely melody typical of Italian opera.
Monday’s concert, called “The Encore,” is an extension of the Palm Beach Symphony’s regular season. The program also includes Brahms’ “Academic Festival Overture” and Beethoven’s famous “Symphony No. 5.” Kenner’s performance expands the relationship with the Frost School that Maestro Schwarz has built with the Palm Beach Symphony, where his graduate conducting students serve as assistant conductors.
Kenner says the tone of the F Minor Concerto is dark overall, although the third movement has lively dance elements, including the Mazurka, the national Polish folk dance. The work is regarded as one of Chopin’s most virtuosic and technically demanding for a pianist. But it also requires tremendous sensitivity and expressive nuance, and a degree of freedom that necessitates an intimate musical rapport between conductor and pianist, said Kenner.
“I’m very glad that I’m playing it with someone with the experience and expertise of Gerry Schwarz,” said Kenner, who performed the work with Schwarz and the Frost Symphony Orchestra in 2021.
“It takes a conductor who has the skill not just to follow but to anticipate what the pianist might do, just like a good opera conductor has to do with vocalists. Master conductors have the wisdom to understand and anticipate what a soloist might do and balance that with an orchestra in a way that provides a beautiful carpet underneath the piano, so that the piano, just like an opera singer, is highlighted.”
Kenner has his own emotional relationship to Gladkowska, Chopin’s muse. He recently performed his own solo piano arrangement of the Larghetto she inspired in the singer’s home in Poland, inaugurating a concert series there soon after it was restored and made into a museum.
“That was very special to me, knowing who she was and how much she inspired Chopin’s younger works,” said Kenner. “It’s very personal when you have lived with a composer for so many years, know what touched him, and then connect to a place attached to a person he felt so close to.”
If you go: The Palm Beach Symphony “The Encore” performance, with Maestro Gerard Schwarz and pianist Kevin Kenner, at 7:30 pm on Monday, May 19, at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Tickets at palmbeachsymphony.org.
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