Well, the stile brillante certainly happened, didn't it? Huge reams of music were written in the idiom, courtesy of Czerny/Hummel/Kalkbrenner/Moscheles et al, but almost nothing from it remains in the repertoire. There’s something treacherous about its fingery tendencies; too often it metastasizes into endless pages of semiquaver slush (it’s *always* semiquavers) that sound vaguely fun for a minute or two before biffing it hard into a pit of etudey cliché.
It’s interesting how major composers navigated the idiom. Schumann (mostly) and Brahms avoided it like the plague. Alkan and Liszt rapidly bent it to explore more orchestral and modernist textures. Who’s left? Hummel, who could write some genuinely exciting stuff on his better days. Mendelssohn, who was gifted enough that nothing he produced sounded unnatural (or indeed especially brave). And then Chopin, who, pretty much alone among the big-name composers, fully inhabited the style, personalising and expanding it without ever seeming to fight its constraints. Out of this early period we get two great masterworks, the Op. 2 La Ci Darem Variations, and the Op. 22. (We also get two pretty lousy works, the Opp. 13-14, but a hit rate of 50% in this idiom is astonishing.)
It's this combination of restraint and personalisation that puts the Op. 22 so far ahead of its contemporaries. The LH provides a lot more rhythmic interest than in most brillante works; even in the work’s first half we get something much more sophisticated than just a Field-style arpeggio, incorporating a G pedal that rhythmically sets up the next bar and fills in melodic gaps. Chopin’s lyrical gift is in full flight—we get gorgeous melodies in not just the Andante, but in two of the four polonaises that follow, and textures are left uncluttered to allow the line to shine. There’s the quality of the figuration itself, in which standard-issue ideas are used in new and astonishingly fun ways. Instead of endless chains of bare thirds, we get them integrated into a crunchy decorated scale (m.26), or used momentarily for a glittery descent (m.66). A diminished 7th chord is livened with emphases on chromatic neighbours (m.73). A melody falls an absurd augmented octave (C to C flat), confirming the briefest change of modal colour (mm.23, 61). Last—and this is hardest to quantify—there’s the ease of the writing itself. A lot of brillante works sound effortful, eager to impress. This work has none of that. It unspools as 15 minutes of pure aural pleasure from first bar to last, and what comes across is the sense of song, or dance, or play.
All of which is to say: the Op. 22 is the greatest piece in the brilliant style written by the greatest composer to seriously deploy the brilliant style. Chopin’s output teems with masterpieces, but it wouldn’t be mad to say that for pure figural joie de vivre, nothing he wrote after the Op. 22 would match it again.
00:00 – Liu, Andante spianato 05:13 – Liu, Polonaise 14:25 – Kempf, Andante spianato 18:58 – Kempf, Polonaise 27:31 – Luisada, Andante spianato 32:47 – Luisada Polonaise