Five Mazurkas

in F minor, Op7, No.3

in A flat major, Op.41, No.3

in E minor, Op.17, No.2

in B flat major, Op.17, No.1

in A minor, Op.17, No.4

Though firmly based on Polish folk models - above all in the diagnostic deflection of the rhythmic emphasis away from the first beat in the bar in a triple-time metre - many of Chopin’s mazurkas are among the most liberated of all his works. It is true that the exotic modes, the irrational bagpipe drones and the uncertain tonality of the folk tradition encouraged Chopin in his departures from harmonic convention here. But no other composer before Bartok went so far in integrating such alien elements into music written for the salon or concert hall.

It is also true that in pieces as short as these, with an average length of only just over two minutes, a composer can afford to take risks. On the other hand, the variety of the material and the spontaneity in deploying it in many of these miniature constructions create an effect far out of proportion with their duration. Even in a work as early as the Mazurka in F minor, Op.7, No.3, written shortly after he arrived in Paris from Warsaw and Vienna in 1831, Chopin lets his imagination run free - from a peculiarly grumbling introduction to a characteristic mazurka melody with primitive repetitions of a two-bar phrase, to an artiful variant on it, to a new theme in D flat major, to an expressive development in the left hand and, by way of an extraordinary modulation, to a reprise of the introduction and the first mazurka melody in F minor.

The Mazurka in A flat major, Op.41, No.3 (No.4 in some editions), written in Paris eight years later, is charmingly simple to begin with, each of its repeated two-bar phrases ending emphatically on the third beat of the bar. But then, in the middle section, it seems to lose its way both metrically and harmonically. It returns from C major to the tonic only with difficulty and, just at the point where it is due to get lost again, it stops in mid-air - poised on harmonies which by a happy chance, apparently, are in A flat major.

The Four Mazurkas, Op.17, were written between 1832 and 1833 and dedicated to Mme Lina Freppa, a singing-teacher friend of both Chopin and Bellini and an interesting link between them. Of course, it is in the nocturnes rather than the mazurkas that one is most likely to find a Bellini line but even here, in Op.17, No.2, it is the decorative melodic tendency that deflects the seriously E minor main theme towards a capricious B major - and, even less predictably, into C major for a middle section with a left-hand drone and, finally, back into E minor.

The self-assertive Op.17, No.1, in B flat major offers no such subtleties until its E flat major middle section where a repeated figure in the left hand clashes delightfully with a mischievously wayward line in the right. Clearly intended as the culmination of the Op.17 set, rather than just another number, the Mazurka in A minor is conclusive in both its comparatively extended construction and, in another drone-based middle section, its reflective allusion to No.2 in E minor. It is also, with its sighing intervals and its exquisitely sentimental melodic decorations, the most overtly emotional of them.