Complete Chopin Études – Polish Music Center

Fryderyk Chopin: Complete Études
Fryderyk Chopin: Etudes, opus 10, opus 25 and “Trois nouvelles etudes” (without opus numbers)

Mehmet Okonsar, piano
okonsar.com

David Ezra Okonsar, pianist, composer, conductor and musicologist is the First Prize Winner at the International Young Virtuosos Competition, Antwerp, Belgium, 1982 and laureate of other prestigious international piano competitions. Okonsar has made both solo and orchestral appearances in major concert halls in Europe, North America and Japan.

He is an alumnus of the Brussels Royal Conservatory of Music, where he studied piano, composition and orchestration with Jean-Claude Vanden Eynden and Madame Jacqueline Fontyn . He was also formerly a pupil of Alexis Weissenberg.

According to the artist:

There is something I find absolutely remarkable, incomparable, in the Etudes by Chopin when compared to others in the genre, like the ones by Liszt for example. With Chopin, there is an impossibility to draw a line between the musical idea and the pianistic one.

I mean by that, generally, there is a musical concept on one side and a pianistic realization on another. With more or less success, composers did realize their musical ideas on the instruments of music or orchestra. In Chopin there is something out of the ordinary which only exists in a few other composers. That is, with Chopin, the musical idea seems to be born out of the pianistic thought without being subordinated to it. I mean by that, with the Studies by Czerny or Moscheles there are instrumental ideas with subject matters like arpeggios, scales and so on. Then, those studies have taken a musical form, more or less genuine, which gave them their final aspect.

With Chopin, of course we have those pianistic “subjects” like arpeggios, thirds, sixths and so on that we all know, and there is the “musical idea”, which itself is great, because it is a musical idea by Chopin. The correlation between this musical idea and the pianistic one is so dense and abundant that we cannot see where one stops and the other gets in. We have, for instance, great composers where the realization of the musical conception on the music instrument seems to be somehow forced. For example: Beethoven.

Everything which makes Beethoven troublesome to play at the piano comes from the fact that he never submits his musical conception to the realities of the keyboard. His musical conception seems to be molded with constraint into the keyboard. On the other side, we have composers like Stravinsky where musical concepts (ideas) seems to be “made” for the instrument. We cannot distinguish where the instrumental realization of his musical concept do occurs. …