The Chopin mazurkas took up the composer’s skills from his early youth until his untimely passing in 1849, and they comprise an anatomy of his Polish musical soul, its rhythms, Lydian harmony, and alternately songful and militant sensibilities. The originally rustic impulse in the national dance has been rarified and urbanized in Chopin’s variegated treatments, which often lengthen the second beat–via his idiosyncratic rubato–and create the impression that the 3-beat rhythm could actually be in 4/4 time. To convert the peasant dance into an aristocrat’s harmonic delicacy seems the intent of many of these explosive works, whose brief duration belies the harmonic compression they contain.
Barbosa exploits their wonderful energy and lyric gift with a sturdy sense of their ternary or binary form, the striking balance of tiny phrases into something like a two- or three-voiced colloquy, as in Op. 30, No. 2. While Chopin collectors are going to continue to relish their favorites on individual mazurkas, say Moravec on Op. 17, No. 4 or Kapell on Op.50, No. 3; Michelangeli on Op. 30, No. 4, and many with Rubinstein, Friedman, and Horowitz, Barbosa’s proves a satisfying set. Again, there are collectors–even pianists–who eschew “integral” surveys of composers’ oeuvres, I recommend the Barbosa mazurkas for their idiomatic, sensitive readings, often with more than a fiery touch of excitement. Eminently musical, bearing repeated hearings for the exquisite gems of invention that turn up anew each time.
–Gary Lemco
