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 of softer and more gentle colours and expression. This new box also features an essay by Peter Quantrill outlining the history of the nocturne and it's lasting hold upon our affections and imaginations.

Barry Douglas CBE has established a major international career since winning the Gold Medal at the 1986 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition, in Moscow. In demand as a soloist and as a recitalist and chamber musician, he has performed with most of the world's leading orchestras. He celebrates his Irish heritage as Artistic Director of Camerata Ireland, the only all-Ireland orchestra, and of the Clandeboye Festival. Celtic Nocturne combines nocturns by John Field, traditional Irish melodies, and three compositions by Barry Douglas, all of which share the lyrical, melodic nature characteristic of Irish music. Born in Dublin in 1782, John Field moved to London in 1793 and continued his studies with Muzio Clementi. Following an extensive European tour with Clementi in 1802, Field finally settled in Russia. His Nocturnes combine classical structure with romantic expressiveness.

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 publisher 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 keyboard. "Tyler Hay has brilliantly mastered and assimilated these often elusive scores." Gramophone, July 2018 (on the piano works of John Ogdon, for Piano Classics)

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 concertos, reviewed by Fanfare). 'Tyler Hay relates to John Field's Nocturnes much as Claudio Arrau did to those of Chopin.' (Classics Today).

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 ‘crystallization 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. 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 color. With its pure, abstract sonority the concise Les Soirs illumineìs par l’ardeur du charbon presents night as verging on silence.

Classical Music

As the pre-eminent forerunners to Chopin’s works in the same genres, the Nocturnes of John Field have few rivals for music well known by history but so seldom heard. They were largely inspired by the slow movements of Classical concertos, Mozart above all, as well as opera arias. From them, Field evolved his own firm concept of a form with rich harmonies and gentle dynamics to suggest the night and dreaming, though in fact he began by giving these pieces traditional names such as Pastorale, Serenade and "Romance. He wrote the 18 works not as a set, but over the course of 15 years, rarely completing more than one and never more than three in a single year. Liszt observed in them ‘The total absence of everything that looks to effect'.

Even when he settled upon Nocturne, Field bestowed upon some of them a qualifying subtitle: ‘Cradle Song’ (No.6), ‘Reverie’ (No.7), ‘Song Without Words’ (No.13), ’Nocturne Pastorale’ (No.17), and ‘Nocturne characteristique Midi’ (No.18). This last Nocturne stands apart from its companions as a tribute to midday, cast as an Allegro, with a coda in which a chiming clock strikes twelve as quicker notes laugh and dance around the repeated note.

As a window on the salons of 19th century Europe, the Nocturnes are taxing neither to play nor to listen to, but they are polished with painstaking finesse, and they demand from the performer all the subtle pianistic guile of Chopin’s works: notably a command of rubato to shape the melodies, and the imaginative and technical capacities of a coloristic palette to bring variety without eccentricity to the sequence.

Tyler Hay can call upon such talents and skills as critics have recognized in his previous recordings for Piano Classics such as an album devoted to the music of John Ogdon (PCL10132) ‘Tyler Hay is a formidable pianist… I believe John Ogdon would be very pleased by these performances of his music’ (Fanfare). ‘The young pianist Tyler Hay has brilliantly mastered and assimilated these often elusive scores, even to the point where I heretically prefer his interpretations to Ogdon’s’ (Gramophone).