The Valse Mélancolique (2012)
thepianofiles.com
thepianofiles.com
Can someone translate this into informed English, please. Specially curious about the "spelling" bit (assuming it is not referring to annotations on printed score).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32626218 ("Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes?")
It's a bit philosophical, but a single piano note can have multiple notational representations, and some are more accurate than others, in a given harmonic context. That this composer chose a "less correct" notation in a couple places, is *technically* a no-op (no audible difference), but most musicians would agree it reflects a sophistication gap.
The writer says that the structure of the piece wasn't the main reason why they suspected it wasn't composed by Chopin. Instead, it was the mistakes in the way the music was put together. Chopin was known to be very careful about how he wrote his music, but the piece in question had errors in the way the notes were arranged, such as notes that didn't fit well with each other and mistakes in how accidentals (symbols that change the pitch of a note) were written. The writer also thought that the harmony (the way the different notes in the piece sounded together) wasn't very good, with too many thirds (a type of musical interval) and poor spacing.
Finally, the writer notes that they never thought the piece sounded like something Chopin would compose - it sounded more like music from Russia. Despite these suspicions, the writer included the piece as a curiosity in their collection and made sure to explain why it was doubtful that Chopin had actually composed it.