discography

Chopin’s F minor Concerto is perhaps just as popular among listeners and performers as the E minor. That equality can be gauged by the fact that both works have been transcribed more than 120 times for various forces (if we include reworkings of individual movements). Yet thanks to this album, we are given here, for the first time in the history of these works’ reception, a transcription of one of Chopin’s concertos in a version for guitar and orchestra.

At first glance, the idea (also realised in the case of the Concerto in E minor), only brought to life in our times by Jerzy Koenig, may seem quite hair-raising. After all, even the most technically proficient guitarist — which Mateusz Kowalski most certainly is — will be unable to keep pace in the brilliant figurations with a pianist. What is more, given the quick fade of the guitar’s notes, no virtuoso of this instrument will fully obtain the effect of ‘instrumental singing’ which was so crucial to Chopin as a pianist and a composer.

Yet the recorded interpretation by the {oh!} Orchestra and Mateusz Kowalski offers us different qualities that normally escape our attention. First, in many lyrical passages, the guitar imparts a truly ballade-like colour to Chopin’s composition, spinning out a different story, more distant from Romantic times. And one thing it is impossible to overestimate: this version thanks to its far greater capacities for nuancing its timbre, often blends more vividly than the piano with the sound of the orchestra, which here comes to the fore more frequently than in the original with the more resonant piano. In Koenig’s transcription, Chopin’s F minor Concerto becomes a sort of symphonie concertante for guitar and orchestra. And the orchestra shows that the concept for the work’s instrumentation, for which the Polish Romantic has been so often criticised, was shaped better than it usually seems.