John Field: Complete Nocturnes (DG)
★★★★★
The most influential Irishman in the history of music is not Bob Geldof, Bono, Sinead O’Connor or the Dubliners, all of whom are famous as influenza, but a fairly obscure piano salesman who awoke a sub-continent to its creative potential.
John Field was born in Dublin in 1782 to Anglican parents who took him to London to work for Muzio Clementi, Beethoven’s publishing partner and piano dealer. As a rep for the wealthy Clementi, Field travelled to Paris and Vienna before settling in St Petersburg, where he starred at the new-founded Philharmonic Society. Field gave three piano lessons to Mikhail Glinka, who turned into the first successful Russian composer.
In London meanwhile, Clementi published Field’s works, among them a line of ‘nocturnes’, by which he meant moods that go bump in the night. Chopin later claimed the genre as his own. Field, a bit of a boozer, died in Moscow at the age of 54 and was comprehensively forgotten.
The German-Japanese pianist Alice Sara Ott came across his music during COVID lockdown while looking for music ‘that would reflect my mildly depressed state of mind at the time.’ Ott’s approach to the nocturnes is audibly post-Chopin, but none the worse for that. The right hand takes runs to the moon while the left picks out a hummable melody.
There are 18 nocturnes in the album and the second, in C minor, is the most demonstrably Chopin-basket. I am drawn to the lyrical fifth, in B flat major, a wisp of regrets.
Ott’s playing is captivating, even when the music gets too wispy. Don’t listen the whole set at once or you might not sleep at night, but two or three will uplift your mood.
This set is definitely a keeper. I hear it’s DG’s most-streamed album of the moment.
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