The International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, the oldest of its kind in the world, is held every five years in the Polish capital Warsaw and is avidly followed by lovers of Chopin, the Franco-Polish composer and pianist who was born in 1810 in Zelazowa Wola near the Polish capital.
Eighty-one pianists from 23 countries are now competing for honours at the competition marking the bicentennial of the composer’s birth.
The competition runs until October 20 and hundreds of performances of Ballades, Nocturnes, Mazurkas and other piano pieces by Chopin are currently available to enjoy through the live competition webcast at konkurs.chopin.pl:
Update:
Who qualified for the second stage? Find out here!
The 2nd stage auditions will start on Saturday, the 9th of October and they will end on Wednesday, the 13th of October.
Chopin Express is an official, bilingual newspaper of the 16th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition published by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute with the cooperation of the musical magazine „Gramophone”. The newspaper will be distributed for free during the whole Competition in the streets of Warsaw and in the Warsaw Philharmonic and are also available online as pdf.
All About Chopin is an international challenge testing your knowledge about Chopin and an initiative of the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, implemented by the Krystyna Bochenek Katowice Cultural Centre, the Chopin 2010 Celebrations Office and the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw. The contest marks the Chopin Year and will take place on October 16th – 17th 2010 in Katowice. It is addressed both to Polish and international Chopin enthusiasts eager to test their knowledge about the life and work of the Polish composer.
“Chopin, in his poetic Nocturnes, sang not only the harmonies which are the source of our most ineffable delights, but likewise the restless, agitating bewilderment to which they often give rise”. Franz Liszt
The Nocturnes span the whole of Chopin’s career, and among them are some of the composer’s most beloved works.
Mention is often made of the influence on Chopin of the Irishman John Field, generally credited as the father of the nocturne. While there is no doubt that links exist between the two, it’s also certain that Chopin’s temperament was quite different from that of his predecessor, as was the range of his modes of expression.
Luigi Borgato, born in 1963, designs and builds concert-grand pianos together with his wife Paola Bianchi, which are of innovative conception and highly regarded by well-known international pianists.
Each BORGATO piano is built completely by hand, unique reality of true handicraft creations in its field. BORGATO’s first grand piano, model BORGATO L 282, was presented in Pesaro in April 1991 for the European Congress “Europiano” for piano makers, technicians and tuners. Inspired by an idea of Beethoven*, Borgato builds his concert-grand pianos BORGATO L 282 with four strings struck per note in the 44 keys of the upper register of the keyboard (design patent BORGATO).
Inspired instead by compositions written for piano with pedalboard **, BORGATO designed, patented and built a new instrument, the “DOPPIO BORGATO”, the first double concert-grand piano with pedalboard. This instrument was presented in Perugia in September 2000 at the “Meeting of the Piano – 300 years since conception”, thus opening a new page to the musical world, this latest creation offering new possibilities to composers and performers.
The “DOPPIO BORGATO” L 282 – P 402 is made up of two superimposed concert-grand pianos, the upper instrument being the concert-grand BORGATO model L 282. The lower instrument is a grand piano BORGATO model P 402, operated by a pedalboard of 37 notes with an extension of 3 octaves (A 27,5 Hz – A 220 Hz), similar to those of the pedals of an organ. A “resonance” pedal is applied to the lower piano which activates the damper mechanism simultaneously on both instruments.
* Ludwig van Beethoven commissioned master craftsman Conrad Graf to make a fortepiano with four strings struck per note. It is possible to view this instrument in his home in his native city Bonn.
** In 1785 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart owned a fortepiano with an independent pedalboard, built expressly for him by Anton Walter. In the autographed manuscript of the Concerto in D minor K466, composed the same year, it is possible to note the extended bass range due to the use of this instrument. Mozart’s father makes mention in some letters of Wolfgang’s use of this piano with pedalboard in public.
In the 19th and 20th centuries other composers also wrote for the piano with pedalboard, among these: 
Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Charles Valentin Alkan, Camille Saint-Saëns, Charles Gounod.
Silvio Celeghin plays Schumann opus 58 no. 3 on a Doppio Borgato:
Pianist Ingolf Wunder performs Chopin’s Scherzo no. 1 on a Borgato L 282:
“Because of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano a man sat waiting Monday afternoon in the Newark airport instead of on a plane to Berlin.
Thank you unpronounceable volcano.
Sitting there, the man got a phone call. Yuja Wang had a sore arm, it seemed, and a doctor had ordered her to rest. The man didn’t wonder why they were telling him this. He got on a plane for Orange County.
The pianist had Chopin’s Etudes, all 27 of them, ready to go. He’s been playing them a lot in recent seasons, and recorded them more than 20 years ago. They’re something of a specialty. So he pulled them out of his luggage and played them here.”
Read full concert review >>
…or listen to “the man”, Louis Lortie, performing
Chopin’s Etude op 10 no 1:
After initial selection based DVD recordings of the compulsory repertoire, the jury chose 215 contestants to take part in further auditions in Warsaw. The group features 24 Poles, 23 Chinese representatives, one person from Hong Kong, five pianists representing Taipei, 22 from Russia and 20 from the USA. The most numerous group – 40 pianists – comes from Japan. The performances will be evaluated by a 17-member international jury. On April 24th, they are going to announce the names of around 80 pianists to compete in the actual competition from October 2nd to 23rd, 2010, in Warsaw. The qualifications’ rules have it that each participant has to play three Fryderyk Chopin’s etudes, one mazurka, and one other composition – a nocturne, ballade, fantasy, barcarolle or etude – chosen from a separate list.
“This is an oustanding achievement, which any genuine Chopin lover and student of Romantic music should own … A landmark in the recording of Chopin’s music … Garrick Ohlsson and Hyperion deserve the greatest success in bringing this important undertaking to such a consistently impressive conclusion” (International Record Review)
Click the sheet music to open the printable autograph score (3.9Mb ) in a new browser window or right click “Save target as…” to download the file.
Please share your comments and personal thoughts about Chopin’s music here and let your friends and colleagues know about this blog post by making use of the “Share/Save” button below.
Reporting from Warsaw — The stirring strains of Frederic Chopin’s music are reverberating across the world as music lovers celebrate the composer’s 200th birthday this year — from the château of his French lover to Egypt’s pyramids and even into space.
But nowhere do celebrations carry the powerful sense of national feeling as they do in Poland, the land of his birth, where his heroic, tragic piano compositions are credited with capturing the country’s soul.
Chopin 2010 – Celebrating the 200th Anniversary Around the World!
Extensive information can be found on the official website available in Polish, English, French to this day and soon in Japanese and Chinese.
Special Birthday Concerts is the first of the three key highlights of the Chopin Year. Held by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, the concerts series spans between the two alleged dates of Chopin’s birth: 22nd February and 1st March. Celebrating the composer’s bicentenary, Warsaw gathers the absolute crème de la crème of the world’s pianists, including: Daniel Barenboim, Piotr Anderszewski, Leif Ove Andsnes, Rafał Blechacz (who is opening the event), Dang Thai Son, Evgeny Kissin, Garrick Ohlsson, Janusz Olejniczak, Murray Perahia, Ivo Pogorelić and Yundi Li.
The pianists are accompanied by Frans Brüggen’s Orchestra of the 18th Century and the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra under Antoni Wit.
All About Chopin is an international challenge testing your knowledge about Chopin and an initiative of the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, implemented by the Krystyna Bochenek Katowice Cultural Centre, the Chopin 2010 Celebrations Office and the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw. The contest marks the Chopin Year and will take place on October 16th – 17th 2010 in Katowice. It is addressed both to Polish and international Chopin enthusiasts eager to test their knowledge about the life and work of the Polish composer. 
Special Birthday Concerts is the first of the three key highlights of the Chopin Year. Held by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, the concerts series spans between the two alleged dates of Chopin’s birth: 22nd February and 1st March. Celebrating the composer’s bicentenary, Warsaw gathers the absolute crème de la crème of the world’s pianists, including: Daniel Barenboim, Piotr Anderszewski, Leif Ove Andsnes, Rafał Blechacz (who is opening the event), Dang Thai Son, Evgeny Kissin, Garrick Ohlsson, Janusz Olejniczak, Murray Perahia, Ivo Pogorelić and Yundi Li.
