Recoding Chopin 25.11

Recoding Chopin 25.11 and Recoding Chopin 28.4 were commissioned as part of the concert “Le piano sans piano” (“Piano Without Piano”) at Arsenal, Cité Musicale-Metz (France). The proposal was to transcribe two pieces of Chopin of my choice for string quartet and solo clarinet.

The studies are by definition compositions based on a highly idiomatic instrumental writing and no other instrument than the piano can perform the brilliant figures played by the right hand in Chopin’s study op. 25 No. 11. On the contrary, the specificity of the piano allows the omission or suggestion of certain voices expressing the harmony: these voices and counterpoints must however be fully displayed, or even reinvented, in a string quartet transposition. I therefore took up the challenge of transforming an eminently pianistic language into an idiomatic writing for strings, like a translator who, instead of respecting the construction of the original text, seeks to reinvent its musicality in an altogether different language.

These operations remain in the field of “translation”, but in Recoding Chopin 25.11 there is an additional dimension. In the rewriting process, some small anomalies have slipped into the piece, near the end; sort of slips of the tongue or memory short-circuits. These copy errors proliferate in the Extended Coda and generate ramifications by “genetic modification” of the original text. The new coda takes on unusual proportions: the musical material incessantly metamorphoses, as in a dream where time and History are abolished.

Filippo Zapponi