Although Marcin Masecki is primarily a jazz pianist, improviser, and composer, his work also includes an album of works by Fryderyk Chopin. With this recording, the artist shows his flair for bold interpretations of the Polish Romanticist’s works. At the NFM, he and the Lutosławski Quartet will present the Preludes op. 28. The catalogue of Masecki, a graduate of the renowned Berklee College of Music, and the Wrocław-based quartet offers an unconventional, sincere approach. What will the performers surprise us with this time?

By taking on Chopin’s music, Marcin Masecki returns to his roots. As a child, he studied it with his grandmother, Halina Masecka, the director of a music school. Although Masecki’s studies abroad and Chopin’s ubiquity in Polish culture initially pushed the young pianist to explore other areas, he never forgot the genius from Żelazowa Wola. Over the years, he has built an identity at the crossover of styles: although he has drawn on classical works such as Bach and Beethoven, he has also performed jazz and alternative music and written music for films. His collaborations include various artists, such as Capella Cracoviensis, Pink Freud, Wojciech Waglewski, Jan Emil Młynarski, Tomasz Stańko, and Michał Urbaniak. Besides his album of Nocturnes, he entered into a creative dialogue with the Chopin tradition and entrusted a ten-strong brass band with the recording of his own polonaises in 2013.

Fryderyk Chopin’s Preludes cycle is the quintessence of his style and a reflection of the emotional rollercoaster he experienced after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. He completed this exceptionally diverse collection during a stay with George Sand in Majorca at the turn of 1839. It consists of twenty-four short pieces – almost half of them lasting less than a minute. They were written in all the keys of the circle of fifths. This approach was a direct reference to the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Individual miniatures vary dramatically in tempo, dynamics, and expression: from abject despair to ecstatic rapture. Taken as a whole, they are a microcosm of the human experience, which Marcin Masecki and the Lutosławski Quartet will explore in their interpretation at the NFM.