Scherzo No. 2 in b-flat

It would be difficult to imagine a modern keyboard concert had Frédéric Chopin (1810-49) not lived. Because he focused to an unprecedented extent on one particular instrument, he succeeded in extracting a dramatic voice that few people knew existed within the piano’s wooden shell. Born and trained in Warsaw, Chopin left the provincial capital at age 19, eventually settling in Paris. He carried with him a prodigious skill at the keyboard, as well as some of his earliest compositions, which prepared his entry into Paris’ salon culture. Friendships took root with Berlioz, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Heine, Delacroix and others, but it was in 1836 that Chopin met and fell in love with the French author Amandine Dupin, better known by her pseudonym George Sand.
During the following months Chopin penned his Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat Minor (1837). His own students claim the opening, hushed motif was to be posed as a question, whose answer comes immediately afterward as thundering chords. Subsequent themes—the first spanning the whole keyboard and marked by glittering cascades; the second, rapturous and poetic, with a lyric melody above rippling arpeggios—show contrasting aspects of Chopin’s brilliance. Following a repeat of this entire opening paragraph, the key changes strikingly from D-flat to A major, and a heartfelt chordal theme carries us seemingly far away from the Byronic opening. The B-flat minor material will return, of course, but for the time being we can be excused for wishing to linger over this radiant A-major section.

(c) Jason Stell