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36 CHOPIN_POLONIA
You have concentrated on the great polonaises (opp.26, 40, 44, 53, the
Polonaise-Fantaisie), excluding the early works. Why?
I’d like very much to record the early polonaises, and indeed I did think of adding
a few or at least one, but I changed my mind, because there’s a good five years
between the last polonaise written inWarsaw and the first of the great polonaises
he composed in Paris. It is anotherworld, aworld of exile, sorrow, despair, amusical
protest against the way liberty had been flouted in his homeland. It was better to
remain within that very special world.
How do you see the sweeping poem of the Polonaise-Fantaisie?
It’s virtually a synthesis of all the others. It’s at once an epic and an elegy, it’s rage
and acceptance, and also something in the nature of an improvisation, which
means it’s a work that’s not easy to record. We know what an outstanding
improviser Chopinwas. He didn’t hesitate to change his own notes, hewould often
make his pupils improvise, and in the Polonaise-Fantaisie a style that one might
call ‘found’ rather than ‘sought’ plays an important role. That’s especially true in the
first section: it’s literally a new world of sound that opens up before us, with that
phrase which seems as if it will never end, right up to the exultant quintessence
of the final bars. When I played it here I wanted to convey the feeling that I was
discovering it for the first time.