If a link is broken, please report it here.
To watch in fullscreen mode, click the play button. At the bottom-right of the video player, click 
The snippet of Chopin’s score on the Dedication page is from a duet between bassoon and piano in the Larghetto movement of his piano concerto, op. 21 in F minor. Chopin composed this incomparably beautiful work in 1829-30 when he was just shy of twenty years old, and as he wrote the Larghetto he was thinking of Konstancja Gładkowska, a mezzo-soprano who was his first Polish love.
In the 2018 performance below, Tomasz Ritter, the 23 year old winner of the First International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments, plays the Larghetto on an 1842 Pleyel. The bassoonist is Hugo Rodríguez Arteaga, performing with the Orchestra of the 18th Century. Read more
The Larghetto movement begins at 2:11:10, and the duet with bassoon and piano begins at 2:19:19
And here is another favorite performance, this one by a much older man: Arthur Rubinstein at age 88, playing with the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Andre Previn in 1975. The Larghetto begins at 14:30 and the duet with bassoon and piano begins at 22:00.
And something very different: a beautiful graphical score by Stephen Malinowski, creator of the Music Animation Machine. The duet starts at 7:39, with the bassoon contributing its own shape and color to the visual representation of this gorgeous work.
Up Next: music links for the Author’s Note….