Kupiński Duo Plays Chopin and Sor

The Kupiński Guitar Duo of Dariusz Kupiński and Ewa Jabłczyńska (screenshot from the Omni Foundation YouTube video)

As was announced this past Tuesday, this morning saw the release of a second video from the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. This one presented the Kupiński Guitar Duo, whose members are Dariusz Kupiński and Ewa Jabłczyńska. (Readers may recall that they were joined by Marcin Dylla in a three-guitar arrangement of the “Concierto de Aranjuez” by the Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo.) The major work on their new program was Fernando Sor’s Opus 54b, a fantasy duet for two guitars composed in 1833.

While this composition was new to me, I must confess that I was far more interested in the works that preceded it. All of them were arrangements of solo piano music by Frédéric Chopin: three waltzes and one mazurka. The mazurka was the last in the Opus 17 collection of four. This is a particularly ambiguous mazurka. There are no sharps or flats in the key signature, and there is a middle section in A major. However, the piece never really settles into A minor until near the conclusion. However, while a single A (440) is dying off, there is an ambiguous progression, which concludes with an F major chord in first inversion. This, for me, was the high point of the video for the intensity of its expressiveness.

The waltzes, on the other hand, were far less unsettling. Their respective keys were C-sharp minor (the second in the Opus 64 set), B minor (the second in the Opus 69 set), and E-flat major (the Opus 18 “Grande Valse Brillante,” which was Chopin’s first published waltz). What I found particularly interesting was the back-and-forth arrangement in which each of the two guitarists accounted for the expressiveness of the respective themes. Considerable attention to sharing the thematic material (if not a certain amount of haggling) made for a visual experience that reinforced the auditory experience, even with the occasional splashes of wit!

Hopefully, these two guitarists will eventually find their way to performing a recital here in San Francisco!