Raul Koczalski (3 January 1884, Warsaw – 24 November 1948, Poznań) was a Polish pianist who studied with Chopin's pupil Karol Mikuli and became an...

Raul Koczalski (3 January 1884, Warsaw – 24 November 1948, Poznań) was a Polish pianist who studied with Chopin's pupil Karol Mikuli and became an acclaimed Chopin interpreter of the first half of the 20th century. Koczalski's command resulted not only from his mother-tongue mastery of precisely those elements of Chopin's pianism that people most often tried to describe (yet found most elusive to master themselves), but from his understanding of musical styles and genres as Chopin understood them. In this idiomatic mode, melody is played in the cantabile style, which means not only with a lovely singing tone but also with a nineteenth-century singer's soloistic rubato, a particular kind of relationship to the accompaniment, and an operatic force of interpretation. Dance rhythms dance, even (especially) when they rush and linger, when this beat or the other is agogically accented, or when the rhythmic flow is suspended for a phantasmagoric flight or a momentary virtuosic display.