By Lyn Bronson
Pianist Hubert Rutkowski
The 2009 Paderewski Festival wound down to a spectacular finish last night as Polish pianist Hubert Rutkowski played a whale of a concert in the Grand Ballroom of the Paso Robles Inn. During this concert he served up to us a lot of unfamiliar music, all of it performed in the grand manner. In a sense this concert was a like a time warp back to the late 19th century. Today, we live in an Urtext generation where faithfulness to the printed score has become almost an obsession. Scholars earnestly debate about how most accurately to perform trills and ornaments, appoggiaturas and grace notes, slurs, lengths of rests, duration of staccato notes, when and where to permit tempo fluctuations, and a great variety of other minutiae, which, while important, can sometimes deflect us from what is truly important: making music so compelling that we engage the hearts and minds of our listeners and move them emotionally.
