In his long essay of 1852, Franz Liszt attested to his friend Frédéric Chopin a “rare distinction of style”.
And anyone who has ever had the opportunity to see the Polish pianist Adam Harasiewicz at the piano or in conversation may be reminded of this verdict, as well as of a sentence from the same homage: "Attitude and manners bore such a distinguished stamp that one involuntarily treated like a prince".
Jan Brachmann
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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The film images from the final of the International Chopin Competition in 1955 show the twenty-three-year-old Harasiewicz with cheerful daring.
He won through his courage, his pride, but also through his taste and what Baldessare Castiglione had described in 1528 as "nobile sprezzatura": a displayed effortlessness, or one would almost have to say: an almost provocative lack of visible ambition.
Chopin himself – described as suspicious, reserved, soft-spoken, but also mocking – was disgusted by everything sensational in music, by the imperative of wooing in an attention economy: “Among the bourgeois here you have to offer something startling, mechanical, what I can't,” he remarked during his 1848 tour of England, when he had to leave the protected space of the noble salon for the market of paid concerts.
Harasiewicz, who since the Warsaw victory in 1955 has devoted his long pianistic career almost exclusively to Chopin, recently said in an interview about his work as a juror at the Chopin Competition that a good Chopin interpretation is characterized by the absence of exaggerations: none extreme pianissimo, no extreme fortissimo, a natural tempo rubato,
i.e. the ability to take logical liberties in time, no display of feelings, otherwise "the feeling does not come from the heart, but from the wallet".
Conscious of the amalgamation of music and mercantilism, of art and the market, Harasiewicz always made his aristocratic stylistic decisions against the bourgeois commercial drive.
The single-mindedness and at the same time freedom with which he approaches the Nocturne in F sharp major, Op. 15 No. 2, show a combative grandeur in the tender.
The care with which Harasiewicz phonetically spells out the different notations of similar embellishments in Chopin's mazurkas is captivating, but not self-conscious.
Admittedly, he shies away from Chopin's really gruesome sides, for example in his B flat minor Sonata or the Scherzi, and leveled the formation of extreme experiences into a classicism that is broken up in these works and not strengthened.
Some of the freedom of older Polish Chopin interpreters such as Ignacy Friedman, Raul Koczalski or Ignacy Jan Paderewski, such as the independence of the hands, has given way to a new rigor of post-war objectivity in his playing.
With Harasiewicz, of course, who turns ninety on Friday, every freedom in tempo and time signature is born out of insight into Chopin's harmonic and formal architecture.
They define the grammar through which the heart becomes capable of speech.