I love the original definition and the one-day festival itself, “Résonances de Chopin aujourd’hui” as a satellite event of New European Bauhaus (Beautiful-Sustainable-Together). Easily conducted by Pick Keobandith, founder of the Inspiring Culture cultural diplomacy institute (there is actually a lot of hard work and communication behind the organization of the festival).

Frédéric Chopin, his music and his destiny touch any heart. How much is in the name and work of the great pianist and composer for us today. In the performance of Belgian pianist Aruun Monteiro Kassam, Chopin’s chords sounded both tender and sometimes rebellious, as in Chopin’s short but feeling-filled life.

The festival began with the Literary Café. A discussion of the book “Madame Pylinska et le secret de Chopin” (we were lucky to see the 2019 theatrical version at Bozar in Brussels with its author, Eric Emmanuel Schmidt, in the title role) with Hannah Heinz, a graduate of the University of Heidelberg, who brought us into the story of a 20-year-old Frenchman, a student at l’École normale supérieure, who learns a new world through lessons in Chopin’s music on the piano. Uncompromising and eccentric, living with three cats named Rubinstein, Horowitz and Alfred Cortot, his Polish teacher has very strange ways of teaching. Piano lessons, comical and cosmic, become a young man’s life and love lessons.

Art historian and archaeologist Alina Trif (VUB) opened for us Nikolai Grozni’s novel “Wunderkind”, which
resonates, sings, shatters, spins and runs, slows down, enthralls, like a concerto or a rhapsody. A book by a writer with the last name of the tyrant Ivan the Terrible, painting the life of a piano-playing 15-year-old prodigy full of temptation and anxiety in communist Bulgaria on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Originally from Romania, the country of the most rigid version of socialism, Alina is an example of talent realized in a moment of freedom and variety of options. The young professor (lacking the exact feminitive) also teaches at the University of Burundi and studies the languages and identities of remote tribes in Africa.

Fashion students at MOME Doctoral School Budapest created light, airy, delicate models for the festival, inspired by the music of Frederic Chopin (pictured are professors and students from the School).
The final chord of the festival “Résonances de Chopin aujourd’hui” was a lesson of the composer’s favorite dance “mazurka”. Charming dance teachers from the “Frisse Folk à Re-Sources” center learned with us the pas of this energetic and elegant, folk and ballroom – Polish dance, popular all over the world. Chopin’s dance treasury is full of mazurkas as well as polonais.