Chopin: 19 Nocturnes (Moravec)

A capital-G Great Recording. Once in a very rare while one of these comes along that is so stubbornly & irreducibly beautiful that it's sort of hard to say anything sensible about it, which obviously leaves reviewers and aficionados with a bit of a problem. I don't think I really knew what legato playing was before I heard this recording, or what Chopin's long phrase marks were actually meant to mean *aurally*. There's too much to praise here: ultra-fine dynamic control, tempi neither fast or slow but always reverential, rubato as free as it is natural, the sheer glory of the tone as Moravec unfurls those long melodies. Even the relatively pedestrian opening of a nocturne like the 15.1 suddenly makes the breath catch. It's weird and deeply uplifting and makes you want to learn all the nocturnes but despair at actually doing it at the same time.

Everyone likes Chopin's nocturnes, but perhaps because they're so generous and immediate in what they offer the listener, their quality is often underestimated: they aren't (at first blush) difficult or weird in the way that we sometimes expect really great music to be. But the nocturnes aren't just excellent pieces: you could plonk them down beside both books of the Well-Tempered Klavier and they wouldn't be out of place. They still stand as one of the all-time big feats of lyrical composition in any genre and time period: all the melodies sound songlike while being (for the most part) unsingable. Right from the first nocturne you've given a 22-tuplet, and then fiorituri (structural ones, not just ornamental fluff) and colouristic novelties and hidden countermelodies and harmonic innovations will deluge you until you reach the last one.

Analysing just one nocturne is an exhausting affair, and I won't attempt an analysis of all 19 here. (Do check out Ohlsson's lecture on just one bit of the 27.2, though.) I guess I'll just make three very brief observations. First, the nocturnes closely track Chopin's stylistic maturation: he uses counterpoint more and more frequently as we approach the late nocturnes, culminating in 55.2, 62.1, and the middle (and very Bachian) section of 62.2. Second, there are in the nocturnes some sections that achieve a kind of late-Beethoven stillness: listen to some of the more minimalist middle sections that Chopin writes, for instance. And lastly: despite being relatively short pieces, some of these nocturnes cover a lot of musical ground in a very concentrated narrative-like structure, almost like ballades in miniature (see 15.3, which also has an interesting structure, 27.1, 62.1).

00:00 – Op.9 No.1 in Bb Min
05:37 – Op.9 No.2 in Eb Maj
10:03 – Op.9 No.3 in B Maj
16:28 – Op.15 No.1 in F Maj
20:55 – Op.15 No.2 in F# Maj
24:55 – Op.15 No.3 in G Min
29:31 – Op.27 No.1 in C# Min
34:47 – Op.27 No.2 in Db Maj
42:04 – Op.32 No.1 in B Maj
47:09 – Op.32 No.2 in Ab Maj
52:40 – Op.37 No.1 in G Min
58:57 – Op.37 No.2 in G Maj
1:04:37 – Op.48 No.1 in C Min
1:10:47 – Op.48 No.2 in F# Min
1:17:44 – Op.55 No.1 in F Min
1:22:40 – Op.55 No.2 in Eb Maj
1:26:54 – Op.62 No.1 in B Maj
1:33:59 – Op.62 No.2 in E Maj
1:39:30 – Op.72 No.1 (posth.)