CHOPIN: 20 Nocturnes – Nelson Freire, piano – Decca B0014053-02, (2 CDs), 48:39, 53:46 ****:
Nelson Freire (b. 1944) joins that pantheon of keyboard masters whose attempt to assimilate all of the Chopin nocturnes (1827-1846) must compel our admiration. From the opening of the B-flat Minor, Op. 9, No. 1, we submit ourselves to that combination of lyric poetry and digital suppleness that defines these special night-pieces as among the pinnacles of their craft. Whatever the Irish composer John Field offered Chopin as a prototype for the salon form of the nocturne, the Polish master quickly outstripped the progenitor by way of bel canto applications to the right hand part. It may have been the Field left-hand technique of using broken chords as a steady rhythmic base wherein the debt lies. But Chopin’s use of ornamentation–as an organic component of the extending melodic line–far exceeds Field’s gifts for an art song instrumentally conceived.
The independence of hands in synthesizing even a simple song–as in the E-flat Major, Op. 9, No. 2–takes on new meaning as the interior drama intensifies and the trill moves to a liberation that will find its culmination in Scriabin. Chopin’s use of asymmetry becomes apparent in the B Major, a novel (Allegretto) approach to the form when its middle section erupts into new material and free rhythm. Freire seems to have economized his expressive style, intimating much with light plastic touches that will remind piano connoisseurs of such legendary colorists as Moiseiwitsch and Cherkassky. Tearful raindrops mark the F Major, Op. 15, No. 1, but its central section volcanically adumbrates the later Ballade in the same key. Freire makes the counterpoint quite vivid, a concession to and affirmation of the harmonic labyrinths that will define late Chopin’s rhetorical style, as in the B Major, Op. 62, No. 1. The eroticism Freire brings to the F-sharp Minor might well have seduced George Sand this very evening. The G Minor, Op. 15, No. 3 supplies all the harmonic and structural irony Satie’s gnossiennes would require through a career. The coda alone–it might be called epilogue–transforms the piece into an askew ballade.
The Op. 27, No. 1 in C-sharp Minor has long had Arrau and Rubinstein as its devoted acolytes, and here (rec. 14-21 December 2009) Freire communes with them. The careful phrasing of the intimate droplets points to Scriabin’s Fourth Sonata, though the national character of the piece erupts into something like a truncated polonaise. The D-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 2 could be said to “belong” to Dinu Lipatti, and Freire might be conscious of that Romanian’s sublimely diaphanous style in his own rendition of this, the ultimate salon nocturne. Freire plays the two nocturnes of Op. 32 as extensions of the waltzes and mazurkas that surround them in Chopin’s catalogue, lyrically sweet and a tad nostalgic. Freire’s pearly play and emotional urgency, however, elevate these and the Op. 37 pair to a courtly status, an ennobled moment of passions recollected, Don Giovanni’s conceit that every woman is worthy of an opus number. The middle section of the G Minor plays like a silkily romantic Bach chorale, the whole of the G Major a berceuse.
The C Minor, Op. 48, No. 1 splices Chopin’s drama with Liszt’s thunderous flamboyance, and Freire takes full advantage of his Steinway’s swarthy sonority to create a symphonic poem of haunted girth. A mystical moment of nightshade, the F-sharp Minor, Op. 48, No. 2 literally sneaks up on our beguiled senses, perhaps more an intimation of “the end of the affair” than its inception. The cautious beauties of the F Minor, Op. 55, No. 1 Shura Cherkassky has traversed to perfection, but Freire’s enjoys a leisurely serenity all its own, wondrously shaded. Ignaz Friedman inscribed an E-flat Major Nocturne, Op. 55, No. 2 for the ages, and Freire certainly approaches the learned counterpoint and interior subtlety of this mercurial nocturne with limpidly ravishing strides. Among the hugest and most harmonically canvasses lies the B Major, Op. 62, No. 1, which fuses the nocturnal sentiment with the impromptu and chromatic fantasia, rendered by Freire in three-hand effects of translucent liquidity that share much with the contemporaneous Barcarolle, Op. 60. The E Major for the same set at first proceeds demurely but evolves into a ballade, even a scherzo, with softly militant aspirations.
The E Minor Nocturne, Op. 72, No. 1 has rarely had such a blatant eroticism pervade its ostinati since Vladimir Horowitz inscribed it for CBS, but Freire, too, implies a sultry night in the tropics of the spirit. Ever since the film The Pianist touted the Nocturne in C-sharp Minor–via Wladyslaw Szpilman’s remarkable story–this haunting work in two simultaneous tempos has inflamed our collective imagination. Freire here rivals Maryla Jonas’ historic account for poetic zal combined with rubato-laden reminiscences of the F Minor Concerto. Its glistening and melancholy last page concludes one of the fine integral surveys of this pillar of the keyboard repertory.
–Gary Lemco
