"Chopin´s playing evoked all the sweet and sorrowful voices of the past. Chopin sang the tears of music...in a whole gamut of different forms and voices, from that of the warrior to those of children and angels..."
Bohdan Zaleski, polish poet, personal diary 2 feb 1844.
"Under the fingers of Chopins´s hand the piano became the voice of an archangel, an orchestra, an army, a raging ocean, a creation of the universe, the end of the world."
Solange Clesinger.
" Fight and find the substance, then go to the higher spheres.
Music takes you to another universe of eternity that remains with you after the concert is finished.
Fight to achieve quality, go deeper... find the origin of the sound.
Technique is not just fast and slow...is the sound, the long sound, the palette of colors, is entering a different space, reaching the diversity of sound.
Rachmaninov had arthritis at the end of his life, he was so weak that his sound was very short, that is the reason he played fast, to fill the vacuum.
If you have long sound you are in command to achieve clarity and the hypnotic sound between the notes.
The problem was always the conflict and the difference between the absolute and the relative quality.
Beauty in music is like in diamonds, the purest diamond in the world is the Koh-i-Noor, it is the absolute beauty to which others with relative beauty are compared.
Most music I could hear was just an ostentatious circus act of virtuoso pieces for up-and-coming pianists, tests of finger dexterity, not art.
You have to get into the phycological frame of mind in which composers wrote their works in order to discover its secrets.
Work as hard as a galley slave.
I do not practice excercises.
When I practice a piece, I do a few variations around it, inventing my own excercises to help in that particular place.
Technique is the art of variety, the art of knowing how to adjust your hand to a particular group of notes to produce a particular sound to fit the particular expectation of the ear.
Sound becomes metaphysical only when you have completely explored all physical possibilities. You should explore until reaching the absurd.
One should always try as much as possible to rediscover music as though one is hearing it for the first time, searching everywhere for new meanings and new depths.
The highest function of the artist is to release the spirituality and the emotional immediacy that lie within the score.
Be constantly engaged in research, I am not only looking at things the way they appear but also trying to find the labyrinths, the secrets of music.
A composition can only be performed well if it is entirely yours, not only every note from memory, but the notes have become you, and you have become the notes.
Nothing happens by chance. Call it a force that some people think controls what happens in the future, and is outside human control, call it preordination, but sometimes happens.
After all, the human element brings total happiness."
Ivo Pogorelich.
