Nocturnes Nos.1-21
Fantasia
Barcarolle, op.60 *
Adam Harasiewicz, piano
Beeping Classics CBOX 2021/5 [ADD,121:56]
"This is music-making of compelling urgency, clear and unsentimental. He treats the most familiar of the Nocturnes, the second in E-flat, with more care than most. A requirement for intermediate piano students (who mostly tend to play it rather badly), its sheer ubiquity has rendered it a "throw-away", like the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Harasiewicz's exquisite artistry negated this wrong-headedness in one fell swoop. The ferocity of the middle portion of the F-major is terrifying; the D-flat is a luminous balm after the moody C-sharp minor. Big-boned in its narrative, the C-minor is really more ballade than nocturne. Harasiewicz's remarkable restraint in the doppio movimento only underlines the dramatic tension. The Op. 62 pair (B major, E major) fly by too quickly for me to absorb the intricacies of Chopin's ingenious covered counterpoint. The tempo of the first is a little too fast, and the second, an elegiac farewell, would have been more heartbreaking had Harasiewicz played its A sections more calmly and simply. "
American Record Guide
*NOT AVAILABLE IN NORTH AMERICA, E.U. & U.K.