70 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022
MUSICAL EVENTS
MOONLIGHT
New recordings of Chopin’s Nocturnes.
BY ALEX ROSS
ILLUSTRATION BY YANN KEBBI
C
hopin’s Nocturne No. 7, in C-sharp
minor, begins with a low, ashen
sound: a prowling arpeggio in the left
hand, consisting only of C-sharps and
G-sharps. It’s a hollowed-out harmony,
in limbo between major and minor.
Three bars in, the right hand enters
on E, seemingly establishing minor,
but a move to E-sharp clouds the issue,
pointing toward major. Although the
ambiguity dissipates in the measures
that follow, a nimbus of uncertainty
persists. Something even eerier hap-
pens in the tenth bar. The melody
abruptly halts on the leading tone of
B-sharp while the left hand gets stuck
in another barren pattern—this one
incorporating the notes D, A, and
C-sharp. It’s almost like a glitch, a fro-
zen screen. Then comes a moment of
wistful clarity: an immaculate phrase
descends an octave, with a courtly lit-
tle turn on the fourth step of the scale.
It is heard only once more before it
disappears. I always yearn in vain for
the tune’s return: a sweetly murmur-
ing coda doesn’t quite make up for its
absence. Ultimate beauty always passes
too quickly.
Three recordings of Chopin’s com-
plete Nocturnes have arrived in the
past year: one on the Deutsche Gram-
mophon label, with the young Ca-
nadian pianist Jan Lisiecki; one on
Harmonia Mundi, with the veteran
French artist Alain Planès, who uses
a vintage 1836 Pleyel instrument; and
one on Hyperion, with the British
polymath Stephen Hough. The no-
tion of listening in a single setting to
these leisurely, contemplative pieces—
twenty or twenty-one in all, depend-
ing on how you count—might have
struck Chopin as bizarre. Although he
assembled sets of nocturnes, preludes,
waltzes, mazurkas, and so on, his leg-
endarily bewitching recitals intermin-
gled selections from various catego-
ries, and also incorporated works by
other composers. Chopin pianists tend
to follow that practice today, in the in-
terest of cultivating contrast; live tra-
versals of the entire set of Nocturnes
are rare. In the more intimate sphere
of home listening, however, the idea
of spending a couple of hours in this
realm is by no means strange, and the
experience gathers its own dream logic.
The C-sharp-minor Nocturne is a
good test case for assessing these pi-
anists’ styles, which diverge in many
respects. Lisiecki is the one who most
consciously follows the high-Roman-
tic school of Chopin playing—a stud-
ied sensitivity that, in the wrong hands,
can evoke a fidgety period-movie per-
formance by someone like Timothée
Chalamet. In Lisiecki’s hands, the Noc-
turne gets off to a deliberately slug-
gish start, as if rousing itself from slum-
ber. The tempo, already languid, drags
slightly as the opening melody arches
upward. Lisiecki keeps the line very
smooth, ignoring several of Chopin’s
accent marks. This withdrawn, ethe-
real atmosphere is broken rather vio-
lently by the tempestuous middle sec-
tion: the left-hand double octaves that
lead back to the main material verge
on Rachmaninoff.
The velvety legato that Lisiecki lav-
ishes on the C-sharp-minor Nocturne
is impossible on Planès’s period in-
strument, which has a crisper, tangier
sound. In Planès’s hands, the princi-
pal melody feels fragile and hesitant,
in an expressively effective way. The
relative lightness of timbre makes the
transition to the middle section un-
usually organic. Because the double
octaves lack booming resonance, they
become more integrated—more noc-
The pianist Stephen Hough approaches the Nocturnes as a set of operatic arias. turnal. If Chopin had had access to
