Chopin In a Box? Dumond Plays the Nocturnes

For anyone seeking the quintessential Chopin, his twenty-one Nocturnes are a study of the seal of compositional genius. They also define the complex and refined qualities of the composer’s unique understanding of the piano during a lifetime. This music is born of silence and improvisation and allowed Chopin to combine the finest elements of his melodic, harmonic and dramatic world. The element of loneliness, the inner secret monologue, seems to have stimulated the most authentic and inimitable inspiration of the Polish composer.

A noted and awarded international Chopin interpreter, French pianist François Dumont is an excellent musician who can make the rich elements and contrasts come to life, balancing cantabiles with the dramatic outbursts in a stylistically fine and controlled way. With Dumont’s clear understanding of simplicity and complexity this AVEA album (2017) will offer an appealing and intriguing experience for any listener.

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The Nocturne, originally an intimate salon piece was in Chopin’s hands turned into a masterful landscape, sometimes extremely dramatic, with poignant intensity.

We can also call them opera arias for the piano as their delicate, ornamented melodies are underpinned by beautifully balanced accompaniments. The Nocturnes share, besides their title and an obsession with a cantabile line (a Chopin trademark) the relatively short duration and their very moderate tempo. Yet the moods of these works are widely divergent. This is also illustrated by a great variety of tonalities: no less than sixteen different tonalities, with almost the same proportion of major and minor keys.