Chopin - Complete Nocturnes review | Andrew Clements's classical album of the week

The Guardian 0

Alain Planès
(Harmonia Mundi, two CDs)
Though not the most imaginative take on the 21 nocturnes, the French pianist captures Chopin’s music as it was conceived on a superb-sounding 1836 Pleyel

Chopin composed 21 nocturnes, 18 of which were published during his lifetime. They span almost his entire creative career – the earliest were written in the late 1820s, when the composer was still in his teens, the last in 1846, three years before his death. That period also coincided with massive advances in the technology of the piano itself; the instruments that Beethoven and Schubert wrote for – the kind that Chopin would have known in his youth – were very different in their tonal capabilities and power from those that he was able to play and compose on in the last decade of his life.