Hello Chopin Waltzes

Introduction

I just kicked off the fourth year of offering classical piano repertoire to conclude worship at First Methodist of Bella Vista. Piano Postludes happens every three months, during the months of February, May, August, and November. For four weeks during each of those months I play pieces according to a common theme. You can get a feel for what I’ve done in past years of Piano Postludes, but this year it’s all about Chopin! As in, Hello Chopin Waltzes! All 17 of them.

Why Chopin?

After completing my project of playing the entire Well-Tempered Clavier Book One of J.S. Bach, I decided that I should do something completely different. Even though you might consider Chopin’s romantic sweep to be quite different from the high Baroque style of Bach, there is more connection that you might think. His 24 Preludes, Op. 28, are written around the circle of fifths, with alternating major and minor keys. Pianist Josep Colom demonstrates how certain of Bach’s compositions were an obvious influence on Chopin. His Confluences album Web page provides sound file examples.

I get that church goers aren’t interested to linger to listen to long postludes. My hope is that these bite sized pieces will be more appealing to those folks. I’ll always have my small group of loyal fans who will stay for whatever I want to play for them. And I’m so thankful for that! People have told me that they can’t attend my post-church recitals due to brunch plans or missing the chance to socialize over coffee and pastry. Hopefully these bite-sized pieces – most are less than 5 minutes long – will take care of that!

My Connection

I will be forever indebted to my master teacher, German Diez, who introduced me to the very first of the waltzes, the Grande Valse Brillante Op. 18. He studied for 10 years with Claudio Arrau in New York City after leaving Cuba before the Fidel Castro era. I listened to a recording of Arrau playing this waltz recently, and said to myself “he plays it remarkably similar to me!” Picking this piece back up has always been easy because I first learned it when I was young! Since I’m writing this post just after starting the project, you can now listen to this first installment on Vimeo.

In Conclusion

Bach will still be on my mind. Since I’m also an organist, he’s never far away. But it’s time to say Hello Chopin Waltzes! I won’t be recording each week’s installment, but at least there’s one to give you a taste into my love of Chopin. I also plan at some point to put together all four Chopin Scherzi that I played as Piano Postludes last year to present in a recital.