For my upcoming concert in Moscow, there has been a soloist change and, as often happens in such cases, a change of concerto. Out goes Ravel G major, in comes Chopin E minor. Faced unexpectedly with the latter work, I decided to revisit and re-mark my orchestral parts for it, hoping to resolve the many ambiguities and discrepancies that seem to plague the text of this work.
It’s a tired trope that Chopin’s orchestral writing is purportedly boring, unimaginative, unbalanced, etc. I suppose one can agree or disagree. But what really struck me this time around was the realization that… Chopin did not even write these parts. Not only was he assisted (who knows to what degree?) by Dobrzyński—itself no crime, of course—but HE NEVER WROTE OUT AN ORCHESTRAL SCORE. So this is why even the Urtext scores we have today from Paderewski and now Ekier are nothing but a reconstitution of a score from the orchestral parts published at the time, and whose provenance is murky.
It takes a great deal of idealism, in light of these circumstances, to consider every discrepancy in slurs or hairpins with the same degree of seriousness as one would allot to similar problems in a Mozart or Bruckner score…