Warsaw to hold first Chopin global competition on period pianos

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Poland's Fryderyk Chopin Institute (NIFC) on Thursday said it would hold the first international competition where pianists will play the romantic composer's music on period instruments.

"The pianos of that era have a mechanism and tone that are very different from those offered by contemporary instruments," said Joanna Bokszczanin, who organized the event in Warsaw on September 2-14.

Participants, who can sign up from next month, will have at their disposal 17 period pianos of brands like Broadwood, Buchholtz, Erard and Pleyel that were known to and used by Chopin.

They either belong to the NIFC or are borrowed from collectors.

A view of a grand piano seen in Chopin's birthplace museum devoted to the composer, located in a small village of Zelazowa Wola, 46km west of Warsaw /VCG Photo

The Warsaw-based NIFC has already been organizing a regular Chopin piano competition every five years since 1927, whose winners often go on to play the greatest venues in the world.

Bokszczanin said that the new contest is "the culmination of a lot of work accomplished already to remind the listener of the authentic sound of Frederic Chopin's music."

A view of a 1933 marble of Fryderyk Chopin by Antoni Madeyski, seen in Chopin's birthplace museum /VCG Photo

The NIFC also conducts research on the 19th-century Polish-French composer's work, in addition to documenting it and promoting it around the world.

Chopin was born in 1810 in Zelazowa Wola, near the Polish capital, to a French father and Polish mother.

A general view shows the interior of the Warsaw Saint Cross church where rests the heart of Polish pianist Frederic Chopin /VCG Photo

He fled his homeland just before the 1830 uprising against the occupying forces of Tsarist Russia.

The prodigy lived in Vienna and then Paris, where he died aged 39 after years of poor health. His body is buried in Paris, while his heart rests in Warsaw's Holy Cross church.

Source(s): AFP