I love Arrau's Nocturnes. I did sort of a major survey of complete sets a few years ago and was amazed to find that most pianists treat these pieces as night-time bonbons. Arrau recognizes that there's much activity going on in the dark.

 

I'll have to try Arrau here! I remember the last time I listened to Chopin's nocturnes, that's exactly how I felt - "night-time bonbons" (although you put it much better, a wonderful phrase there!)...

 

Arrau's awesome. The only thing that bothers me is the hissing in the recording... this bothers me particularly with solo music. Having been spoiled with excellent piano recordings with a black background, it's hard for me to allow less... But still, Arrau is one of my favorite pianist. I also really enjoy Simon and Moravec.

 

Arrau's awesome. The only thing that bothers me is the hissing in the recording... this bothers me particularly with solo music.

You mean the whistling of the wind as it passes through his nose? :lol:

I'm used to it and admire the performance, but the would-be buyer needs to know.

 

^ ^There are several errors in the above post, and it's too late to edit it - so consider this both a correction and a cautionary tale (get the facts straight!). Don't want to mislead the whippersnappers (the geezers are already thoroughly mislead anyway).

1) The spectrogram window in GoldWave does have a frequency scale display option - I found it yesterday.

2) That scale tells me that engineer set the low pass filter for the LPs at ~16kH - which ought to allow the nose whistle; I just didn't hear it.

3) Never mind those 'options', unless you have the means to process the sound yourself.

There. My conscience isn't clear, but it's clearer than it was a minute ago.

 

" 'salon music' -- is of quite modest actual technical demand while designed to sound much more accomplished than needed in its realization. It also followed / follows every light and passing fancy of fickle 'fashionable taste."

The above is an excerpt, slightly edited, of a statement by a friend and colleague of mine to a similarly aimed comment on Liszt, i.e. that a good deal of Liszt was 'salon music.'

The same can be said of Chopin, that by level of technical demand, and the depth of the music itself, none of it is in any way 'salon music.' To render it as such, or with even a hint of that light and slight manner, is to completely misunderstand Chopin.

Chopin is dark, bold, harmonically wild -- and that far more than just a little adventurous for its time: it is thoroughly 'modern' in that regard. With a real understanding of what Chopin's music was, and still is, it is not at all difficult (with the requisite technical arsenal in the performer's toolbox, natch) to make it sound, even today, dark, wild, 'modern,' and anything but 'salon like.'

Generations have come to love Chopin -- through generations of misinterpretation -- as Chopin the flowery, the sweet, the cloyingly sentimental, the pretty -- bah!

I think Chopin, especially how so many lesser professionals and almost all amateurs render it, is the most widely and frequently misunderstood and wrongly performed of the composers of the greater piano works. Arrau and those few others who render it dark, wild, and anything but sweet and flowery (including the nocturnes) are those who get it right.

 

I guess this thread is going to make me spend some time with Arrau's renditions.

Samson Francois has been my go to for a very long time. I never found his sweet and flowery either.

 

Yea, I never could see Chopin as a flower-child. His darkness is too obvious. Nearly the musical version of Poe... and they both died in October of 1849. WooooOOoo

 

Arrau's Chopin noctures are nice! Rubinstein's are beautiful, too.

 

I've tried to like the Arrau Nocturnes but his approach sounds fussy. The rubato is a case in point as I think it is somewhat overdone. Arrau tries to use rubato to make the music more expressive and this is evident in the first few bars of Op 9/1. Rubinstein and Moravec don't take this approach. They use dynamics instead. What i really like about the Moravec recording is his use of silence.

 

Agree about Arrau's approach. I don't know Moravec's version (yet) but I prefer my Chopin "neat", à la Rubinstein.

 

Then try the one CDs worth of recordings on Testament by the great English pianist Solomon. The best Chopin I've ever heard so it's such a pity that's all there is by him.

 

We'll have to agree to differ on that, mijnheer. I wish I could play the piano one thousandth as well as either of them, but sometimes when they play solo piano music I hear a little too much of them and not enough of the composer for my liking. These days I prefer them both as conductors.