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.