Biography (read more)
Raoul Koczalski (in Poland usually Raul Koczalski) was born in Warsaw on 3 January 1884 and died in Poznan on 24 November 1948. A prodigy who first appeared in public at four and was heard by Anton Rubinstein, he never attended a conservatory: his training came from private lessons, above all in piano and composition with Karol Mikuli (1821-1897), described by Wikipedia as “Chopin’s favorite Polish student and composer”, which makes Koczalski a great-pupil of Chopin. He gave his thousandth concert in Leipzig in 1896, and before he was twelve had received the Order of the Lion and Sun from the Shah of Persia, the title of Court Pianist from the King of Spain and a medal from the Turkish Sultan. He lived in Germany through the 1920s and 1930s, wrote criticism under the pseudonym Georg Armand(o) Koczalski, founded a music school that went bankrupt, and re-established himself as a concert pianist by 1934, touring France, Italy and Poland but never the United States for reasons of health. Interned at Bad Nauheim during the First World War and in Berlin during the Second, he moved to Poznan in 1945 as a professor at the State Higher School of Music. He was also a prolific late-romantic composer – operas, six piano concertos, symphonies, chamber music and several hundred songs – and published a book on Chopin in 1936.
Koczalski’s importance rests on his descent from Chopin’s own circle. Mikuli had been Chopin’s pupil and the editor of the Kistner Chopin edition, and Koczalski built his career on that inheritance: the complete Chopin and the complete Beethoven sonatas lay at the core of a very extensive classical and romantic repertoire, and he was considered one of the greatest interpreters of Chopin’s music and one of the greatest pianists of his time. Contemporary description credits him with a very liquid technique, smooth balance, and interpretations that avoided the liberties of many of his contemporaries and stayed closer to the written score – which is exactly why his records are read as evidence about how the Chopin tradition sounded before the modern era. His late-1930s Chopin discs and the surviving 1948 live broadcasts, reissued by Selene Records in the series The Great Polish Chopin Tradition and by the Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina, are among the most-cited documents of the Polish Chopin school. He taught as well – his pupils included Detlef Kraus and Monique de La Bruchollerie – and his planned edition of Chopin’s piano works, left unfinished, would have been a significant source for performance practice.
Sources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Koczalski
- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&prop=extracts|pageimages&explaintext=1&piprop=original&titles=Raoul%20Koczalski
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- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&prop=extracts|pageimages&explaintext=1&piprop=original&titles=Raoul%20Koczalski
- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&prop=extracts|pageimages&explaintext=1&piprop=original&titles=Raoul%20Koczalski
- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&prop=extracts|pageimages&explaintext=1&piprop=original&titles=Raoul%20Koczalski
- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&prop=extracts|pageimages&explaintext=1&piprop=original&titles=Raoul%20Koczalski
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- https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&prop=imageinfo&iiprop=url|extmetadata&titles=File:Raoul_Koczalski.jpg
- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Raoul_Koczalski.jpg
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV2gdk0c1fTFxwGapRLi2bg/releases
- https://www.youtube.com/oembed?format=json&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dpq_IB-Dd9bQ
- https://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/player [POST videoId=pq_IB-Dd9bQ]
- https://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/player [POST videoId=PmP9A22GwmE]
