Let me start by saying that this has been one of the most gloriously unsettling experiences in my many years of reviewing. Jan Lisiecki's response to the Chopin Nocturnes amounts to a radical re-think of their stature. For him they are key and central rather than peripheral or a decorative part of Chopin's oeuvre. To quote Keats, Lisiecki 'loads every rift with ore' strikingly contradicting his own belief, 'most important, the Nocturnes remain elegant and simple.' He also contradicts Chopin's belief that 'simplicity is the final achievement' and moving forward in time his is a challenge to Charles Rosen and his admirable belief that the greatest playing comes from pianists who while appearing to do little or nothing end by doing everything. For Lisiecki fullness and emotional complexity are all. Here is Chopin in all his 'embalmed darkness'(Keats again), in all of his alternating pain and solace, his sudden anger and resolution. These are never the Nocturnes as you have known them.
Chopin Complete Nocturnes. Jan Lisiecki. DG
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His very way with the opening, opus 9 No 1 in B flat minor tells you of his essentially 'vocal' freedom, that of a great singer of the keyboard, while in No 2 in F sharp major, from opus 15(the Nocturne James Huneker so absurdly if delightfully described as being 'inseparable from champagne and truffles.') he can be aptly capricious, even coquettish. In extreme contrast he gives you all of the drama of opus 27 No 1 in C sharp minor, the bleak, austere melodic line floating high above that wide left-hand mesh of arpeggios, the central uproar and final calm and repose. Then there is the B major Nocturne opus 32 No 1, its outward Field-like surface unsettled by the constant interplay of 'stretto' and ritenuto', culminating in sinister timpani strokes and a violent rhetorical uproar prompting Lisiecki to fire off the musical equivalent of pistol shots. For ever responsive he finds all of the grace of the G major Nocturne opus 37 No 2 with its flow of double not figuration and sudden swerves from expected cadences and resolutions. In opus 62 No1 in B major he realises to the full the audacity of its opening cadence(for Chopin's contemporaries very much the shock of the new) and in the central idyll you hear the nightingales of Nohant singing their hearts out. Again, Lisiecki is at his finest of all in opus 48 No 1 in C minor, most powerful and elegiac of all the Nocturnes.
Clearly, I could go on forever. Lisiecki's Chopin deserves a book rather than a review. There are, of course, many available recordings of the Nocturnes and I would never want to be without Artur Rubinstein's first set dating from the 1930s, an ever-shining example of aristocratic pianism; patrician to the core. More recently there have been notable sets from Maria Pires(also on DG) and Stephen Hough, cool-headed, at times poetically evasive, but never less than pianistically supple and elegant. Individual performances are too many to detail with all too brief offerings from Cortot, Lipatti, Argerich and most of all Horowitz with his empathy for the dark side of Chopin's genius(for Rudolf Serkin his Chopin was 'like a fireball exploding')
But to return to Jan Lisiecki, a pianist with gradations of tone and colour given to very few. Boldly transcending convention, he helps explain the bemusement felt by both Schumann and Mendelssohn. For them Chopin's daring was a step too far. It took Liszt, far sighted as ever, to appreciate, -- not without a touch of envy-- Chopin's genius. As it is Lisiecki joins his fellow-Pole Jan Kott(his study 'Shakespeare Our Contemporary') by making Chopin forever contemporary. He has been superbly recorded by DG who include four striking photographs of the pianist.
Bryce Morrison