Piano Recital
✨Mozart & Chopin ✨
From Clarity to Fire - with Stephane Gaulier
📅 Event Details:
Date: Friday October 30
Time: 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Location: North Hall, 2 Curie Ave, Little Bay
Tickets: $15 or Voucher
This afternoon’s programme begins with Mozart’s Sonata in C major, K. 330, composed in the mid-1780s. It is music of luminous clarity and perfect balance: three movements in which every line speaks with effortless grace, and the whole is shaped by proportion rather than force. The Fantasia in D minor, K. 397 reveals a different Mozart — questioning, dramatic, and almost improvisatory in spirit. Its sudden turns and searching harmonies seem to loosen the boundaries of classical form. Here, in the late eighteenth century, the door to the Romantic imagination quietly opens.
Chopin steps through that door into a new musical world. In Paris during the 1830s and 1840s, writing for a piano newly capable of singing, sustaining, and blazing with power, he created vast emotional landscapes within intimate forms. The Four Mazurkas, Op. 67 draw on the dance rhythms of his native Poland, transforming them into music of memory, tenderness, and inwardness. The Fantaisie-Impromptu seems to spring freely from the moment, though every gesture is exquisitely shaped. The two Waltzes, Op. 69 — the first known as L’Adieu — are less ballroom dances than private farewells. Finally, the Polonaise “Militaire”, Op. 40 No. 1 brings the recital to a brilliant close, with the proud, upright energy Chopin reserved for the sound of Poland itself.
Stéphane Gaulier is a French concert pianist and educator with a particular affinity for Baroque keyboard repertoire, including the harpsichord and organ. Recognised for his deep understanding of early music and historically informed performance practice, he now turns with curiosity and imagination to the riches of Romantic keyboard literature. This recital marks an exciting new chapter in his artistic journey, bringing the refinement and clarity shaped by the earliest keyboard traditions into dialogue with the passion, colour, and expressive freedom of Chopin’s world.