Chopin on Tap at Piccolo Spoleto

What an opportunity for five College of Charleston music students: to perform at Piccolo Spoleto. And what an experience for the audience in the Albert Simmons Center: to hear five gifted students of Enrique Graf. Talent and teaching were both on vivid display.

Each of the students (David Keiser, Chee Hang See, Micah McLaurin, Jesus Manuel Toro, and Lisa Lee) played works by Frédéric Chopin. Each player was articulate, expressive, and in solid command of the keyboard. And all of them were impressive to watch. So consistently, in fact, that you could not help but feel the influential hand of their mentor, Enrique Graf. He can mold talent, that’s for sure.

Something especially nice about this concert was the chance to hear five different pianists playing five different Chopin pieces. You usually hear one pianist play a full or partial Chopin program, and you go away with an impression of that pianist’s rendering of the Polish master. But in this case, in addition to getting a good taste of each pianist’s interpretation and technique, you came away with a clear sense of Chopin himself. In particular, his robust and inexhaustible exploration of the keyboard.

Frédéric Chopin

Chopin’s music is appealing in large part because it can be romantic, brooding, sentimental, playful, and profound in the same piece as well as in different pieces. And whatever his mood or expression, the music exhibits his indelible style. It’s Chopin. Nobody else found those same remarkable chords and combination of sounds which never lose their lyrical quality or their ability to alter our inner landscape.

Perhaps because Chopin’s music has so much character, pianists seem to feel that they must ‘show’ how deeply they sense the music in their playing of it. But that is always a tiresome distraction for the audience—which is something else that was so refreshing about this performance by Enrique’s young students. They were just themselves trying to play these extremely demanding keyboard pieces. Consequently, we the audience were not distracted by their ownership of Chopin’s expressiveness. We were simply left to witness the awesome breadth of Chopin’s musical flair and his relentless fervor in plumbing the piano’s, and his own, depths. ¶