Ep. 17: Too Fast for Chopin, Too Fast for Pollini

In this episode of the Authentic Sound Podcast, Wim Winters and Stefan Pospiech take a deep dive into one of Chopin’s most iconic études: Op. 10 No. 9 in F minor, the famous left-hand étude — and into what happens when it is played at radically different tempos.Using Maurizio Pollini’s legendary recording as a reference point, Wim places it side by side with his own Whole Beat–based interpretation. The goal is not to “prove” one pianist right and the other wrong, but to ask a more fundamental question: what does Chopin’s score actually imply about tempo, character, and musical meaning?Listeners are introduced to the central idea behind the Authentic Sound project:Whole Beat metronome practice, the 19th-century convention in which the metronome measures the full swing of the pendulum rather than individual ticks — resulting in substantially slower and more coherent tempos than the modern single-beat reading.As the episode unfolds, Stefan and Wim explore how extreme modern speeds force performers into constant tempo manipulation, how expressive moments repeatedly drift back toward Whole Beat in even the greatest modern recordings, and why Chopin’s meticulously notated accelerandos, rallentandos, and atempo markings tell a very different story from today’s performance tradition.At stake is more than just tempo: it is the character, rhetoric, and emotional architecture of the music itself. As Wim puts it, changing tempo changes everything. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wimwinters.substack.com/subscribe