Chopin with Pow

By William Bender

A bespectacled 22-year-old American out of White Plains, N.Y., who greatly resembles a tight end recently became the darling of countless Poles from Cracow to Lodz by doing something very dear to the Polish heart: playing Chopin with great power and feeling. His name is Garrick Ohlsson. At Warsaw during the three-week-long International Chopin Competition, he was awarded first prize over 80 other pianists. He is the first American ever to win the contest and the first young American pianist since Van Cliburn back in 1958 to become an overnight national hero behind the Iron Curtain.

Today international music contests are about as numerous--and as hard to tell apart--as Vivaldi concertos. The Chopin event, though, is exceptional because it is held only once every five years, so competitive standards are kept high. After his victory, Ohlsson embarked on a frantic twelve-day concert series in Poland, followed by a four-concert tour with the Philadelphia Orchestra. What he played, of course, was his victory piece: Chopin's Concerto in E Minor. At Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall, there were brief bubbles of superfluous agitation. But most of the time Ohlsson played Chopin with unmistakable taste, power and imagination.

No Tea Cookies. Never gazing hammily at the ceiling as so many romantic keyboard idols do, Ohlsson made it clear that he prefers Chopin the dramatist, without entirely sacrificing Chopin the nocturnal perfumer. Rightly so. In the E Minor Concerto, Chopin accomplished the considerable feat of turning the roulades, trills and other frills of the 19th century salon style into the stuff of major symphonic theater.

A 6 ft. 4 in. 225 pounder, Ohlsson is fond of pointing out that the small-boned Chopin loved nothing better than hearing a stronger pianist tear into his music. "You know," says Ohlsson, "in the U.S. we treat the mazurkas, for example, as inconsequentially as tea cookies. But the Poles don't want that kind of refinement. Mazurkas are folk music to them. What they want in them is a nice pow!" Ohlsson has the pow, and starting right now, he also has the how of a new and brightly blooming musical career.

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