And although Chopin’s achievement was built on by such composers as Liszt, Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Debussy and Ligeti, no one has really surpassed Chopin’s two sets of Etudes, Op. Clementi developed the genre further, but it was Chopin - who-inspired in part by Paganini’s Caprices for solo violin, which he heard in Warsaw as a young man when the violin virtuoso toured there - eliminated the didactics and wrote pieces of innovative musical value. Masters such as Czerny and Hanon had already written their famously taxing exercises in technical dexterity, but their musical content is minimal. The bravura dimension he supplies in the first of these, in C major, serves very satisfyingly to show just how in this early part of Chopin’s career the composer was already elevating the Etude form onto its highest musical plane. Shishkin’s virtuosity was never in doubt, at least not after he launched himself into the First Stage with the first three of the Etudes Op. And this, too, distinguished his vision of the Concerto in E minor’. Weighing up his performances for the Chopin Courier at the end of the competition, Andrzej Sulek said that, ‘From the first round onwards, the Russian presented enormous technical potential’, also adding that, ‘On the plus side of his balance sheet, we should mention structure drawn with geometric clarity. Something of a veteran of competitions already - having won prizes in youth competitions as long ago as 2006, and more significantly the third prize in the 2013 Ferruccio Busoni Competition - Shishkin certainly showed that he knew how to pace himself across the gruelling three weeks in Warsaw. This time, though, the highest-ranking Russian was placed sixth in the final accounting: Dmitry Shishkin, who by the standards of Russian-schooled players had displayed quite a light touch. In the long history of the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, it has been rare for Russia not to be represented among the laureates, and 2015 proved the rule again.
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