雪軒齋隨想

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Attended by 94 pianists from 25 countries

The prizes were awarded in the following order:

I	Yundi Li (China)
II	Ingrid Fliter (Argentina)
III	Alexander Kobrin (Russia)
IV	Sa Chen (China)
V	Alberto Nose (Italy)
VI	Mika Sato (Japan)

The Frederick Chopin Society and Warsaw City Council ex aequo prize for the best performance of a polonaise -
Sa Chen (China), Yundi Li (China).

The Polish Radio prize for the best perfomance of the mazurkas - not awarded.

The National Philharmonic prize for the best performance of a concerto - not awarded.

Honourable mention:

Ning An (U.S.A.), Etsuko Hirose (France), Valentina Igoshina (Russia), Radosław Sobczak (Poland), Nicolas Stavy (France), Mihaela Ursuleasa (Romania).

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Recitative, a form of composition often used in operas, oratorios, cantatas and similar works, is described as a melodic speech set to music, or a descriptive narrative song in which the music follows the words.

Recitative is easily distinguished from more florid and melismatic arias, as the rhythms and melodic contours of recitative often approximate to those of normal speech, often including repeating pitches. It is used where dialogue or monologue is sung in between the arias, choruses or other numbers, and is intended to help move the story along quickly.

Recitative often has very simple accompaniment, sometimes nothing more than a continuo instrument (for example, a single harpsichord) playing occasional chords. The terms recitativo secco and recitativo accompagnato (or recitativo stromentato) are sometimes used to distinguish recitative accompanied only by continuo and recitative accompanied by the orchestra.

Historically, the recitativo, in the religious composition tradition, specifically the passions, derived from gregorian chant (hence their monotonous reciting manner): for special occasions like Easter, the gospel text would be sung in a reciting (gregorian) style, alternating with hymns or other song-like texts not quoted literally from the gospel story. The latter would develop in arias and choruses, while the former set the standard for the recitativo.

The "recitativo" style of singing was not abandoned completely in pop culture: in fact raps, when using the ancient musical terminology, could be correctly described as "recitativo accompagnato".

The word has sometimes been used in relation to parts of purely instrumental works which resemble vocal recitatives (passages in Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 17 (The Tempest) and Piano Sonata No. 31 are examples).

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A madrigal is a setting for 4–6 voices of a secular text, often in Italian. The madrigal has its origins in the frottola, and was also influenced by the motet and the French chanson of the Renaissance. It is related mostly by name alone to the Italian trecento-madrigal of the late 13th and 14th centuries; those madrigals were settings for 2 or 3 voices without accompaniment, or with instruments possibly doubling the vocal lines.

The madrigal was the most important secular form of music of its time. It bloomed especially in the second half of the 16th century, losing its importance by the third decade of the 17th century, when it vanished through the rise of newer secular forms as the opera and merged with the cantata and the dialogue.

Its rise started with the Primo libro di Madrigali of Philippe Verdelot, published in 1533 in Venice, which was the first book of identifiable madrigals. This publication was a great success and the form spread rapidly, first in Italy and up to the end of the century to several other countries in Europe. Especially in England the madrigal was highly appreciated since the publication of Nicholas Yonge's Musica Transalpina in 1588, a collection of Italian madrigals with translated texts which started a madrigal-culture of its own. The madrigal had a much longer life in England than in the rest of Europe: composers continued to produce works of astonishing quality even after the form had gone out of fashion on the Continent (see English Madrigal School).

Late madrigalists were particularly ingenious with so-called "madrigalisms" — passages in which the music assigned to a particular word expresses its meaning, for example, setting riso (smile) to a passage of quick, running notes which imitate laughter, or sospiro (sigh) to a note which falls to the note below. This technique is also known as "word-painting" and can be found not only in madrigals but in other vocal music of the period. The most important of the late madrigalists are certainly Luca Marenzio, Carlo Gesualdo, and Claudio Monteverdi, who integrated in 1605 the basso continuo into the form and later composed the book Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi (1638) (Madrigals of War and Love), which is, however, an example of the early Baroque madrigal; some of the compositions in this book bear little relation to the a cappella madrigals of the previous century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrigals

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The Florentine Camerata was a group of humanists, musicians, poets and intellectuals in late Renaissance Florence that gathered under the patronage of Count Giovanni de' Bardi to discuss and guide trends in the arts, especially music and drama. They met mainly from about 1573 until the late 1580s, at the house of Bardi, and their gatherings had the reputation of having all the most famous men of Florence as frequent guests. Known members of the group besides Bardi included Giulio Caccini, Pietro Strozzi, and Vincenzo Galilei (the father of the astronomer Galileo Galilei).

Unifying them was the belief that music had become corrupt, and by returning to the forms and style of the ancient Greeks, the art of music could be improved, and thereby society could be improved as well. They were influenced by Girolamo Mei, the foremost scholar of ancient Greece at the time, who held—among other things—that ancient Greek drama was predominantly sung rather than spoken. While he may have been mistaken, the result was an efflorescence of musical activity unlike anything else at the time, mostly in an attempt to recover the ancient methods.

The criticism of contemporary music by the Camerata centered on the overuse of polyphony, at the expense of intelligibility of the sung text. Ironically, this was the same criticism leveled at polyphony by the Council of Trent which had met in the immediately preceding decades, although the world-view of the two groups could not have been more different. Intrigued by ancient descriptions of the emotional and moral effect of ancient Greek tragedy and comedy, which they presumed to be sung as a single line to a simple instrumental accompaniment, the Camerata proposed creating a new kind of music.

In 1582 Vincenzo Galilei performed a setting, which he composed himself, of Ugolino's lament from Dante's Inferno; it was a frank imitation of what he thought to be an ancient Greek type of music (unfortunately, the music for this is lost). Caccini also is known to have performed several of his own songs which were more or less chanted melodically over a simple chordal accompaniment. The musical style which developed from these early experiments was called monody; it developed, in the 1590s, through the work of composers such as Jacopo Peri, working in conjunction with poet Ottavio Rinuccini, into a vehicle capable of extended dramatic expression. In 1598, Peri and Rinuccini produced Dafne, an entire drama sung in monodic style: this was the first creation of a new form called "opera." Other composers quickly followed suit, and by the first decade of the seventeenth century the new "music drama" was being widely composed, performed and disseminated. It should be noted that the new form of opera also borrowed from an existing pastoral poetic form called the intermedio, especially for the librettos: it was mainly the musical style that was new.

Of all revolutions in music history, this one was perhaps the most carefully premeditated: it is one of few examples in music, before the twentieth century, of theory preceding practice.

Both Bardi and Galilei left writings expounding their ideas. Bardi wrote the Discorso (1578), a long letter to Giulio Caccini, and Galilei published the Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna (1581-1582).

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