Martín García García at Westminster Cathedral Hall for the Fryderyk Chopin Institute

This afternoon I was invited to a promotional event put on jointly by the Chopin Society UK and the Fredyryk Chopin Institute of Poland during which I got to hear Martín García García, 3rd Prize Winner of the most recent Chopin Competition, perform an hour-long all-Chopin recital.

I had wanted to hear Martín play for a while now. He became known for his very unique and personal style of interpreting Chopin during the competition and captivated the hearts of many audience, including a lot of my friends.

After a charming introduction by press spokesman of the Chopin Institute Aleksandr Laskowski in which he endeared to us by trying to connect the Chopin Competition with Britain by way of the railway and steam engine (TL;DR) Martín was invited to say a few words before his performance.

Immediately one could tell he was a very open and generous person, very comfortable with speaking to his audience, and I was glad to see that personality came across even more brilliantly when he was at the piano.

Unfazed by the prospect of opening the concert with one of Chopin’s most profound—and among his last—works, the Polonaise-Fantasie, Martín seemed to feel immediately comfortable at the keyboard, creating all sorts of colours I hadn’t previously imagined despite hearing this piece so many times. Martín played with such generous emotional spontaneity that I felt I was discovering the piece together with him. Under his fingers the music emerged organically and naturally which only a musician with great generosity and openness could conjure. When we reached the climax I felt like we had been through a long and personal journey together even though it was only the first 12 minutes of the programme.

The otherworldly Polonaise-Fantasie was followed by music of a more lighthearted nature: Chopin’s Impromptus and Fantasie-Impromptu, music which Martín spun and weaved for his audience with his alluring spontaneity and inspired, effortless virtuosity. It was refreshing to listen to him play; despite such familiarity with Chopin’s music, one still held one’s breath to see what Martín García García would do with it. And what he did to the music was never borne out of high-mindedness but generous love.

The recital closed with Chopin’s almost completely unknown First Sonata. Despite Martín trying to make a case for it—and he did so with great understanding and love for the music, not to mention handling its technical demands with great aplomb—it just did not convince me. The music seemed miles away from what we recognise to be Chopin’s distinctive sound, rather metricised following the German tradition, bearing traces of Schubert and Schumann (the theme of the unnecessarily yet atrociously difficult final movement bears too great a resemblance to the opening of the finale of Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy!), not having anything distinctive to say. No wonder Chopin did not want it to published during his lifetime!

Nevertheless, what one left with was an impression of Martín García García’s interpretative style, a performance very personal yet very communicative, one which obeyed the impulses of the heart faithfully.

He played two encores, both fragments of larger works; the first was “Chopin” from Schumann’s Carnaval, the second was Variation 10 from Federico Mompou, in which the middle theme of Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu is beautifully reharmonized.