Tyler Hay - 18 Nocturnes - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The largest collection of piano nocturnes on CD, celebrating the art of the romantic piano song without words. Over a century of repertoire in all modern recordings, plus a new booklet essay exploring the history and context of the nocturne.Composers of the 18th century such as Haydn and Mozart wrote notturnos as serenades to be sung and played at night time, both on an operatic stage and as independent pieces for entertainment. The early 19th century saw a rapid evolution in the technological, the cultural and the musical development of the piano - as an instrument of longer sustaining power and greater volume than before, offering a broader palette of tone-colours, presenting composers with the potential to write quasi-orchestrally for a single instrument, as Baroque composers had done for the organ. At the same time, musical forms were becoming looser, more shaped by extra-musical inspirations in literature, poetry and the natural world. The Irish composer John Field was the first to publish nocturnes for the solo piano as standalone works, rather than as poetic interludes within larger pieces such as suites or sonatas. Having inherited the form from Field, Frederic Chopin then raised the nocturne to new heights of inward expression. As much as the salon became a place for pianistic display of technique, it also became a space for quiet soliloquy through the course of the 19th century, accessible to the rapidly expanding bourgeoisie with access to an instrument at home and to the education required to play it. Thus publishers commissioned nocturnes from both greater and lesser composers to satisfy an ever-growing market. The nocturnes in this box cover all the great names of Romantic-era piano writing, and many lesser-known ones too. Many of the performances are played on instruments of the period, enabling listeners to immerse themselves into a 19th-century world

The Irish-born composer John Field is still celebrated today as 'the father of the nocturne' for his creation of a genre which went on to inspire Chopin and generations of Romantic-era composers for the piano. Field's own talents at the piano were recognised early, when the boy was just nine years old, and further nurtured by Muzio Clementi when the Italian-born, London-resident composer and took him on as a pupil. Thus although the first three of Field's sonatas date from 1801, when he was still a teenager, they are the fruit of a decade-long devotion to the art and craft of music. Unpretentious in form and melodic profile, each of these two-movement sonatas opens with a sonata movement sounding near to Beethoven in one of his milder moods, though No.2 presents a theme which strikingly anticipates one of Schubert's late impromptus. The musing character of these movements is then answered by a toe-tapping minuet, as if to banish all care. While sharing the proportions of these Op.1 pieces, Sonata No.4 is a standalone work dating from 16 years later, once Field was installed in St Petersburg as a high-living pianist to the Imperial Court. The passing of time might account for the gentler nature and richer harmony of the Fourth Sonata's second movement. These neglected pieces only came to wider attention during the 1970s, when they were first recorded, and the discovery of them will still delight any collector of early-Romantic pianism. On this new recording, Tyler Hay prefaces each Sonata with a shorter piece demonstrating the range of Field's talents and expressive palette. There is the Rondo on Del Caro's Hornpipe; a Yearning Waltz; a set of Variations on a Russian Folksong; and finally a ruminative Andante inedit in E flat which, like the best of his work, looks forward to the era of Chopin and Schumann in asserting the stature of the pianist as a poet of the keyb

A comprehensive introduction to a foundational figure of early Romantic music modern recordings of all the concertos and solo piano music by 'the father of the nocturne', the Irish pianist and composer John Field. Frederic Chopin was only the most celebrated of many pianist-composers to pay warm tribute to the musician who, more than any other, invented the genre which became synonymous with musical Romanticism. His exquisite tone-poetry on the page, as well as the brilliant imagination of his playing, proposed a new way of addressing the piano, and responded to the rapid advance in the instrument's technology during the first decades of the 19th century. Where Beethoven had sought to stretch and challenge and conquer the piano, Field drew from it a more intimate style which mirrored the cantabile and legato of Italian singing. Born in Dublin in 1782, Field received his earliest lessons in music from Tommaso Giordani, and then continued his studies in London with another Italian immigrant across the Channel, Muzio Clementi. While Field went on to achieve celebrity as a pianist across Europe before settling in St Petersburg, and dying of alcoholism in 1837, he left a legacy of music for his instrument which gradually fell from prominence. During the last half century, and the early-music revival's focus on this pivotal era in music history, Field has been re-assessed. This comprehensive collection presents Field as a major figure of early Romanticism a witty virtuoso in the concertos, a master of form in the sonatas and nocturnes, and above all a mind which could translate impressions into notes, especially from the natural world. These recordings were enthusiastically welcomed for their detailed precision and sympathy with Field's idiom. 'The performances and recorded sound here are very fine... a lovely, leisurely listening experience.' (Restani's cycle of the conc