Nocturne Musique pour harpe Luise - BRIL96498 - Petits prix - par Brilliant Classics

A meticulous, focused search for sound informs the selection of pieces on this recital, a voyage through 19th-century European music, in the vehicle of the nocturne, along the route of harp transcriptions. In these works, the composers capture night as a sliver of time, evoking the intimate and introspective side of the Romantic spirit. Night is also a metaphor for transformation, from darkness to light, for transcription from one musical instrument to another. For this ‘reduction of a big thought to a practical instrument’, as Ferruccio Busoni put it in 1913, the harp was a popular choice, particularly in the late 19th century, when the instrument’s repertoire was augmented by a number of excellent transcriptions and reductions by renowned harp teachers and performers. Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata provides the ideal starting point for a sonic journey through the light and dark of the Romantic spirit. Czerny’s short arabesques, Der Abend und die Nacht, continue the theme of twilight and night-time fantasy. Irishman John Field did not invent the nocturne, but he was responsible for the ‘crystallisation of an idiom’ that, a generation later, Chopin would take to new heights. The second movement of Brahms’s Piano Sonata No.3 evokes a nocturne, but on a larger scale. In the score is an epigraph with several verses by the poet C.O. Sternau hinting at a night-time embrace between two lovers. Debussy’s Clair de lune envelops the listener in a night freed from traditional formal structures, providing a brief escape from the 18th-century style of the preceding movements. His Nocturne in D flat, on the other hand, transports us back to Romanticism, its mysterious bass octaves and tender arpeggios leading to a melody of expansive, Chopinesque lyricism, which stands out above the changes in harmonic colour. With its pure, abstract sonority the concise Les Soirs illumine´s par l’ardeur du charbon presents night as verging on silence: the deafening quiet of a cold winter evening during World War One, when the anguish of the present is mixed with gratitude for a shipment of fuel, expressed in Debussy’s gift of the manuscript (rediscovered in 2001) to the coal merchant Monsieur Tronquin.