HENRI KOWALSKI and the cult of Chopin A stroll through the narrow and cobbled streets of the Old Town, along half-timbered houses with patterned beams is like a journey back in time - no wonder Dinan is considered to be the best-preserved medieval town in Brittany. For long time an inspiration of painters, Dinan was also frequently visited by the pianist HENRI KOWALSKI, whose wife, Marie Eloy, a Parisian opera dancer, owned a chateau on the river Rance. Born in Paris in 1841 to a Polish officer father (an émigré to France after the fall of the 1831 Uprising) and to a mother descended from an aristocratic Breton-Irish family, Henri started to learn piano at the age of 6. Amongst his first teachers were the illustrious students of Chopin: Marcelina Czartoryska, Thomas Tellefsen and Julian Fontana. Unsurprisingly, the Chopins tradition and influence stayed with Kowalski for the rest of his much travelled life. Deciding on a career of a soloist pianist, he toured France, Europe, USA,New Zealand and Australia, where he settled for over a decade. Often called the Prince of the Pianoforte he composed some 300 pieces, ranging from piano miniatures to the operas. Only now, almost 100 years after his death in Bordeaux (1916) this legend of world piano, a virtuoso in his own right and a foremost exponent of Chopin, has become a subject of a biography written by a French professor of musicology, Marie-Claire Mussat. Fittingly the launch of this 200 page long publication titled In the wake of Chopin: pianist Henri Kowalski (1841-1916) took place in Dinans City Hall - in the very room where Kowalski once played and talked about the composer to whom he dedicated his life - Fryderyk Chopin. M.O. MUSICAL LINK: youtube/watch?v=YnlSrR7Wsjg
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 10:16:37 +0000
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