Chopin: Ballade No.2 in F, Op.38 (Kempf, Paleczny, Demidenko, Neuburger)

The middle child. Almost everyone picks 1 or 4 as their favourite, a decent number have 3, and practically nobody says 2. And it’s easy to see why – the ABABA structure of the second ballade can look prosaic compared to the luxuriant tangles of the other 3. As for the material: the obsessive opening chorale is almost entirely bereft of expressive markings, while the second theme is entirely figural. All the other ballades have at least one uplifting (grand in No.1, exuberant in No.3, transcendent in No.4) climax, but all the big moments here are pessimistic.

In fact this is probably the most deliciously subversive of the ballades. Start with the structure. An apparently straightforward repeat suddenly veers, after a stark break (m.88), into the development. And in that development, what you think is an approach to the dominant that prefigures the recap (m.120) turns out only to charge the music for yet another extended period of harmonic wandering. And when you to get the recap, what sounds like a literal restatement of T2 turns out to be in the wrong key (Dm, not Am), even as the texture and tessitura disguise that fact. Harmonically, this ballade has a certain tongue-in-cheek wickedness about it: diverted cadences (most prominently that B7 at m.115), passages that lack any sense of total centre (that infinitely extendable rising line at m.108), and an epic, excruciating pause on an unresolved French aug 6 (m.197).

This ballade’s tight architecture (bit like a sonata-rondo, actually) also traces a single clear argument: through its length, T1 is attacked and denatured by T2, become a pale, bleak thing by the closing bars. It’s a nice little nod to sonata-type reasoning, the notion that two ideas that are out of joint eventually come together. In a sonata that “out-of-jointness” is tonal (different keys in the exposition), while here it’s a larger contrast that gets resolved, and strongly in favour of the pessimistic idea. So even this ballade’s much discussed two-key scheme is much more than just a trick.

This ballade features some of Chopin’s most bitter writing. The coda, with its agonal repeated notes, ranks up there with the last movement of the Bbm Sonata and two of the preludes as one of the most revolting things Chopin wrote (and it’s utterly amazing). T2 (and the coda) have a kind of rarefied savagery (those fistlike chords at m.189) all in service of the basic contrast the work sets up and resolves. That’s why T1 is so plain (or naïve, or tranquil, as you interpret it): it sets off everything else, which is (almost uniformly) ugly and painful.

00:00 – Kempf. Clarity, directness, focused on the big picture. Achieves one of the very hardest things to do in music in T1, which is a genuine semplice. The second theme very well-controlled, with some well-judged lifting of the pedal at m.48 (and similar places) to better convey the figuration’s stuttering reiterations. The transition from m.63 is a great example of big-paragraph playing: keeping strict rhythm to build momentum. The coda is a paroxysm of terror; brutal, machine-gun repeated notes nearly devoid of expressive device. Of the recordings I know only this and Neuberger’s successfully interpret the coda as inhuman and monstrous.

06:43 – Paleczny. Colour, rhetoric. The A section is little hesitant, a little lost, like a daydream. The B section is interpreted in the most anti-figural way possible; prolongations on the first beat of the bar, very parlando LH phrasing (see how the long phrase entering at m.51 is accompanied by a quickening of the tempo and a clear marking of each harmonic enclosure. The final pages are filled with menace – the transition to the coda mysterious rather than the fierce, and the coda itself pausing to dwell on striking textures (e.g., the stutter at m.184 (13:20).

14:18 – Demidenko. All about contrast. The A section is very slow and very quiet, limned in a halo of pedal. The B section crashes into this like a juggernaut, not only much faster but seeming to come out another titanic sound-world. The sheer mass of sound Demidenko manages to create in the coda too is remarkable; you can feel him ploughing every note, no matter how rapid or repeated, for everything it can give (helped by some agonising rubato, which he's otherwise quite reticent with).

22:22 – Neuburger. Pulse, movement, detail. The first theme is beautiful and very tender: purity of melodic line, exquisite dynamic control (the dynamic drop at m.22), and even airy overdotting of the siciliano rhythm. This could all sound precious, but never does. In general, a steady pulse that keeps the music moving, even in the harmonic meanderings inf the development. The coda doesn’t have quite the brutal precision of Kempf, but is more relentless in its absolute denial of rubato at climactic points (see especially mm.187-196). It’s cold and inhuman, but that’s the point, and Neuberger plays like a man possessed (28:39).