Beyond the Frame: On Interpreting the Masters

As both composer and performer, I’ve long been drawn to the paradox of fidelity in interpretation. What does it mean to be “faithful” to the work? As I work intensively—four hours a day, seven days a week—on the Chopin Ballades, I keep circling this question.

Of course, authorial markings matter. They are a kind of case study in intent. But they can never be exhaustive. And if interpretation were merely the perfect execution of notational data, we would never need more than one great performance of any given work. The notion that fidelity demands suppression of the interpreter’s voice seems to me not only incorrect, but creatively barren.

My approach is to honour the structure, yes, but to allow for a reading that may be, in some small way, “unauthorised”—not in the sense of betrayal, but of illumination. An angle of light falling across a familiar figure in a way that reveals something newly alive.

That image—of light—brings me to the analogy I often use:

The score is the painting. But the performance is the gallery space in which the painting is hung. Its dimensions, its walls, the placement of the canvas and—most crucially—the light. The light may be deliberate: the conscious interpretive choices of the performer. But it is also seasonal and circumstantial: the weather outside, the hour of the day, the unconscious being of the one who stands in the space.

In this analogy, I am both the gallery architect and its lighting designer. But I am also a 21st-century Australian man living in a semi-rural environment. That part—the part of me that I didn’t script—is like the sun streaming in through the high windows, casting shadows I did not plan.

So when I play Chopin, I aim to understand the truth of the work, but not to fix it in amber. Even if a miraculous cylinder recording of Chopin himself playing the Ballades were to surface tomorrow, I wouldn’t imitate it slavishly. Reverence, yes—but not ossification. A great work endures not because it is frozen in a single ideal performance, but because it can refract across the centuries, through changing seasons, and still reveal more.

And in that refracting light—sometimes warm, sometimes strange—we find the work not diminished, but alive.