Chopin in South Kensington - Part 1
Posted: Saturday 27 February 2010 - 0 comment(s) [ Comment ] - 0 trackback(s) [ Trackback ]
Category: General
 
'Dear Friend! Well, at last I am installed in the abyss that is called London. I am breathing better these last days, because it is only these days that the sun has shown his face. I have called on M.d'Orsay...he received me very well... ' Chopin, letter to Adolphe Gutmann, Saturday 6 May 1848
 
Chopin's time in England and Scotland in 1848 is well documented. He moved in aristocratic circles, meeting Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at Stafford House, where he performed mazurkas, waltzes and a work for two pianos by Mozart in a concert which also featured three singers; sadly, Queen Victoria's diary makes more mention of the singers than of the pianists.
Reading about a concert Chopin gave in Kensington Gore prompted me to search on foot to see if the venue still exists: Gore House, then home to the Count d'Orsay and Lady Blessington, and a centre of attraction for London's fashionable literary and artistic society in the 1840s.
 
Kensington Gore is well known to music lovers in London as being the streets immediately adjacent to the Royal Albert Hall, that splendidly huge concert venue in South Kensington famous for housing the Proms. But the RAH and surrounding buildings are all post-1848, as are the present flats in Kensington Gore.
 
So where did Chopin play? 
 

Gore House was demolished in 1857 and originally had a three acre estate. The house was built in the 1750s and decorated by Robert Adam; a luxury hotel, the Gore Hotel at 190 Queen's Gate, now stands roughly where the house was. The original estate was purchased by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 ( first President - Prince Albert) and developed as part of a large area which includes the RAH, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Imperial College, the Natural History Museum, and, most fittingly, just around the corner - the Royal College of Music. More of that anon...

 
 
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-6gUx74ILQ Chopin Waltz in A flat, recorded by Cortot 1934
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