Nodame makes her debut playing Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with a top British orchestra conducted by Stresemann, also known as Milch. But which hall is this? Nodame Cantabile #22 offers a clue on p. 65.
This too is a perfect match. That means the “top British orchestra” is the London Symphony Orchestra.
Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 was written for his farewell concert before he left his native Poland. After a grand orchestral introduction, the piano enters with a bang. Nodame then suddenly gives a performance utterly unlike the rehearsal—“What? So slow… What an original performance!” (original work, pp. 79–81). The live-action film is not particularly extreme, but the anime faithfully uses a remarkably slow tempo.
In fact, I did not particularly like this piece1. The piano was beautiful, but the orchestra felt thin and tacked onto the piano, and compared with Chopin’s later works, I always felt the music lacked density. Then I heard the anime version and began to think, “Perhaps I have misunderstood this piece all along.” So I started going through every recording I could find. And there it was: an amazing recording. This is it—a performance described as having “startlingly powerful individuality.”
First, please listen to the piano’s entrance on YouTube.
This is probably a divisive performance. Some may call it “vulgar,” but it is extraordinary. It was released in 1999, so it almost makes me wonder whether Tomoko Ninomiya heard it, was startled, and found the expression “What? So slow… What an original performance!” After all, every description fits: “This sounds like a completely different piece”; “But… it is wonderful!! She plays the pianistic passages improvisationally and with rich emotion” (p. 82); and “Then the beauty of every note and the strength of the music draw people in before they know it” (pp. 87–88).
The orchestral expression in this performance is also fascinating and never feels as thin as I had previously thought. It could be called one culmination reached by a Polish pianist, who won the Chopin Competition when young, leading a Polish orchestra.
(Postscript)
In the Facebook group “Let’s Listen to Classical Music!”, someone suggested that the performance by Samson François and Louis Frémaux might be close to Stresemann and Nodame. Here it is.
Indeed, the orchestra begins at an ordinary tempo, then the tempo suddenly slows when the piano enters—exactly like the Nodame setup!
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Footnotes
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