Playing Chopin

I'm getting to a stage now where I have quite a reasonable repetoire of Chopin's pieces... but I can't help but wonder how to actually play them; should I concentrate on the technical side and follow all performance directions given to the letter or should I mainly concentrate on putting emotion into my playing?

If anyone knows the best way to play Chopin i'd gladly welcome some advise please!

Play his works they way you think they should be played, but obviously follow the 'advice' on the sheets. the man is dead now and we have no recordings so its impossible to play them perfectly, but its all opinion. Personnaly, i dramatise it all, as he was a romantic composer. But you must not lose the subtleties in the music, make hints and suggestions of parts that are to come later in the piece, or make it sound like its about to explode when you know its not going to. Take the music on a journey. Thats what i do anyway

ok thank you very much - I like to play chopin because of all the rubato feeling you can put into it, and i suppose everyone is unique in the way they put emotion into music.

thanks again

I will say this: it is not a Schubert Impromptu where everything is a rubber band. It is more similar to Debussy. Taking time, but keeping time.
Make a beautiful sound before you romanticize it.
You never want it to get out of hand.

one of the biggest mistakes young people do when trying to learn Chopin is to play it with too much rubato. start learning it straight, get everything right and then work on the subtleties of the performance.
and remember that Chopin was an early romantic composer heavily influenced by the classical period which can easily be heard in his music (or seen in his scores).
and if I remember right(might be confusing with someone else though.. ), there is some anecdotal evidence from one of his students that Chopin himself played using a rigid tempo compared to how most play his music.

Yup, that was really him.

Ok thanks for the tips - i love playing chopin - he's definately my favourite composer ^.^

I suppose it depends: Do you see yourself as a romantic? Or not?

If you want to take the romantic qualities, by all means, play it however you want. But, if you feel that the music should be played the way it's written, focus more on the technical aspects.

In short, it's really up to you to decide your own style of performace.

(I'm personally a romantic though!)

Originally Posted by SimonTerlecki

one of the biggest mistakes young people do when trying to learn Chopin is to play it with too much rubato.

The problem here very often lies in the way you think of rubato. Most young or inexperienced (and sometimes not so inexperienced) people, when told to play rubato, actually play slower. Rubato means, as you might know, "stolen". Every bit of time that you add somewhere has to be taken away from somewhere else. A "proper" rubato doesn't really change the total time it takes to play something: for every decrease in tempo somewhere, there has to be an increase in tempo somewhere else. It all should add up to 0. No time to dig up a citation, but Chopin was supposedly very good at maintaining such a rubato "in time". He would often play the accompaniment strictly in tempo, while the melody was free to speed up and slow down as the music warranted, as long as it didn't stray from the general pulse of the accompaniment. Even when you're not actively maintaining a steady beat yourself, this is the approach you should take. Imagine that you're playing a jazz standard, and that there's a bassist and a drummer with you. Whatever expressive dragging or rushing you do, don't leave them.

And that kind of rubato is not at all foreign to Chopin. Yes, he maintained a more rigid pulse than many do today, but paradoxically he didn't necessarily play with less rubato. Just a different rubato.

So, how much rubato did he use?