The music world loves anniversaries. Indeed, it looks for them, whether it’s birth, death, marriage, whatever. Unlike the literary world, which will soon mark the birth of Dickens in 1812 with perhaps an essay or two or yet another dramatization of one of his novels, the musical world, because of the performance necessary to it, will celebrate in a large way the births of this year’s crop of anniversary composers -- Frederic Chopin and Robert Schumann -- with many performances and recordings.

Since Chopin’s birth occurred earlier this month (March 1), and Schumann’s comes in June, let’s look at Chopin here. Not that he needs much further examination – his works are everywhere.

I get the feeling that Chopin has become for certain pianists the artist they turn to frequently, as they used to (and still do) with the keyboard works of Bach. Chopin was never neglected, of course (unlike Bach), but just as every significant pianist of the last century has made a point of playing or recording Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Goldberg Variations or at least one other major Bach keyboard sequence, so too are pianists looking to approach Chopin’s etudes, waltzes, nocturnes and other piano works as a mark of their own skills and interpretative energies and a study of the composer’s versatility within those seemingly limited forms.

Nelson Freire just released an album devoted to Chopin’s nocturnes. This follows a recording of the nocturnes he released in 2006, and one that included the composer’s scherzos, polonaises and waltzes that same year.

Maria João Pires last year released a two-disk recording that included several Chopin nocturnes, sonatas, mazurkas and waltzes, as well as his cello sonata in G minor.

Those are just two recent examples of the wealth of new recordings of Chopin music out there, alongside recordings by great pianists such as Martha Argerich, Maurizio Pollini, Alfred Brendel, Vladimir Horowitz and many, many others.

I think among the connection between Chopin’s piano works and Bach’s keyboard compositions is that they each explore the limits of tonality through teaching.

I don’t mean to imply that Chopin’s output, his mazurkas, polonaises, even his nocturnes, are the same as his extraordinary etudes. Nor do I mean to equate Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier with some of his other keyboard works. But something about the nature of what these two different, but somehow linked, composers were doing by exploring the nature of tonality, of harmony, of the keyboard, while training the fingers, the ears, the imagination of pianists (and composers), has lingered. Bach was defining the tuning system for modern classical music. Chopin was stretching the nature of harmony.

A great pianist playing through the preludes and fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier presents a work that sounds both distant and immediate. Bach’s careful working out of the scale seems to anticipate the Romantic composers working out a sense of self expression through harmonics. A great pianist playing through the etudes or nocturnes of Chopin reveals music that is both strange and oddly comforting, lyrical and intellectual.

Our ears have become used to piquant harmonies within Chopin, but they still resonate as if they’re new, and his Slavic touchstones, which once seemed so faraway, now, in an age that has absorbed the many varieties of folk music, whether from composers such as Liszt and Brahms or Bartok or through an appreciation for this music on its own, make it seem almost accessible.

Chopin’s works continue to have an eerie and thrilling allure that give them a sense of enduring modernity well into their second century of life.

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AND DON'T MISS:   Classical TV's Happy Birthday, Chopin!, featuring a wealth of Chopin performance videos, and Everything Chopin on Classical TV.

We’re at the time of year when another year looms. An artistic year. That is, announcements for the coming seasons at symphonies, operas, subscription theaters.

Season announcements are a curious hybrid of hopeful buzz-building and elaborate planning. There are many moving parts in the music world, when performers’ schedules are often set two or three years ahead, so the artistic administrator – the person who usually puts together the season plan, working with the musicians and music director – has to come up with not only a viable plan that has excitement (that elusive quality), but also something predictable (that quality music critics loathe but subscribers are said to need in order for them to renew) and something imaginative (which means, as often as not, a contemporary work) that will appeal to the cynics out there, mainly music critics.

I don’t mean to come off as cynical myself about season announcements. They are necessary for many parties (development staff, arts writers, arts administrators) and I was impressed by the plans that the New York Philharmonic has drawn up for its next season beginning in the fall.

I attended the announcement event that the New York Philharmonic held in the glass lobby of the newly redesigned and reconstructed Alice Tully Hall, across the street from the Philharmonic’s home at Avery Fisher Hall, where renovations to various Lincoln Center structures continue. It promised something for everyone, and gave conductor Alan Gilbert, in his first season as music director, a chance to discuss his feelings about the successful current season (his conducting has helped re-energize this great ensemble) and to look ahead to the coming one. (These occasions are often ones for public pats on the back among an institution’s players, before a crowd of friendly, if slightly bored, journalists.)

With this coming season the Philharmonic is really trying to engage with the varieties of music available to listeners today, and the diversity of potential audiences. The opening night will feature the U.S. premiere of a new work by jazz great Wynton Marsalis, who will perform it with the Philharmonic and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, an acknowledgement of the continuing dynamic interplay between jazz and classical music.

The new season will also feature a staging of Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen, a rare full staging of an opera at the Philharmonic (usually if operas are performed, they’re done in concert version), and the world premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis’s a Voice, a Messenger, a work for trumpet and orchestra inspired by passages in the bible relating to the shofar.

The Philharmonic will present the New York premiere of English composer Thomas Adès’s In Seven Days, a multimedia concerto, featuring the composer at the piano, and video by Tal Rosner, an Israeli artist. Demonstrating music director Gilbert’s gift for mixing programs up in ways that enable audiences to rethink classic repertory works in light of hearing new pieces, that performance will include Mozart’s magnificent Symphony No. 40 in C major (the Jupiter) and Thomas Hampson singing Mahler’s heartbreaking Kindertotenlieder. Now that sounds like an evening one would like to be present for.

One of the most interesting aspects of the coming season at the Philharmonic is the continuing presence of Magnus Lindberg, the Philharmonic’s Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence. The Finnish composer will be marking his second season with the Philharmonic, and has helped Gilbert shape programming of the coming season. It reflects Lindberg’s wide-ranging contemporary sensibilities, and demonstrates too the Philharmonic’s commitment to new music, at a time of continuing cutbacks that affected commissioning.

Lindberg’s mid-1980s work Kraft will get its New York premiere next season. This work was inspired by the punk movement. Lindberg has acknowledged the importance of the energy that punk music brought to the contemporary scene, and he for one is perhaps that rare contemporary composer who doesn’t live in a musical vacuum.

So the Philharmonic’s season announcement did what season announcements are supposed to do: get people talking about the future of classical music, which is a refreshing thing indeed in an age of hand-wringing about the state of the arts.

Many jazz musicians are prized for their ability to improvise. In fact, they are sometimes judged more on their improvisational imagination and harmonic breadth than their technical skills. The same used to be true of classical musicians. But that was a long time ago.

Nowadays, a classical pianist or violinist or instrumentalist of any kind is judged by his or her ability to hew to the composer’s wishes, whatever they may be, according to the solons of musical interpretation. It’s as if critics knew the scores by heart (though some do) and look for deviations from the accepted norm of whatever Beethoven or Mozart or Brahms wrote. Is it any wonder that so many people find the whole atmosphere of concerts stuffy? When musicians are expected to “interpret,” but only within the proscribed, accepted modern versions of what interpretation means, the results can be a bit airless.

Classical music used to thrive on improvisation. In the Baroque era, organists often improvised over a figured bass accompaniment. Improvisation used to be the piece de resistance at a concert in the 18th century (in those days, the movements of symphonies were often split up, too – little was sacrosanct about serious music).

During Mozart’s era, and that of the classical period, all musicians were expected to have an ability to improvise. Mozart himself was a master at it, naturally, being one of history’s true geniuses. “Observers were unanimous in praising Mozart’s art of free improvisations at the keyboard,” writes Hermann Abert in his monumental 1923 book about the composer (which was translated into English only in 2007). “For Mozart,” Abert goes on, “this was not a means of helping him to compose but an independent creative activity, the results of which were committed not to paper but to the instrument in question. … Here, too, we are dealing with a living organism.”

That’s an important point. Music was a living organism, performance was its breathing, improvisation was its exercise.

As any fan of vocal music knows, singers from the Renaissance onward used ornamentation when they performed. Opera singers are less likely to offer free ornamentation when they sing – they will interpolate sometimes the ornamentations that certain composers such as Rossini wrote for certain singers – and in the popular arena, ornamentation (or contemporary melismatic overkill) has gone so far that you wish singers would just go back to singing the song as written. And rock fans often cherish the guitar solos of their favorite stars (though cover bands must recreate those improvisatory interludes note for note – which robs them of their energy).

It’s interesting that just about the time when classical composers were drawing inspiration from the freedom and harmonic invention of jazz musicians, classical musicians were being forced to stick to the script. Part of this may be the dawn of the recording age, when listeners could become better acquainted with various versions of well-known pieces. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, most middle-class homes had pianos, and many people were musically literate, knowing the scores of the great composers. Still, they applauded deviations from them, in the interest of the performance, with the realization that music was a living organism. Our notion of how to interpret classical music has changed, and what we expect of classical musicians who perform it has changed as well.