Though he composed a vast array of works for piano (including seven concertos and three sonatas), it’s for his series of nocturnes that the Irishman John Field (1782-1837) is chiefly remembered. Field is usually credited with inventing the nocturne as a pianistic form, in which a gently lyrical melodic line is floated over broken or strummed chords. Chopin would take the nocturne to far greater expressive extremes, but Field’s examples are more than just precursors; they deserve the close attention that Alice Sara Ott has clearly lavished on them.
Ott began to explore Field’s music during the Covid lockdowns; it was, she writes in her sleeve notes, “as if I had known it since my childhood”. The earliest of the 18 nocturnes she plays dates from 1814; some of them carry subtitles – No 6 in F is a Berceuse (or Cradle Song), No 15 in D minor a Song Without Words – and one or two hardly seem to conform to usual ideas of what a nocturne is (“I often found it hard to know whether to place [it] in the classical or romantic period,” she writes). But Ott plays them all with great affection, never attempting to make them seem more profound or expressively complex than they are, and in treating this neglected music simply at face value, she has done it proud.
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