Arrau: Chopin – The Nocturnes, Barcarolle, Fantaisie (2 CD, FLAC)

Performer: Claudio Arrau
Composer: Frederic Chopin
Audio CD
SPARS Code: A-D
Number of Discs: 2
Format: FLAC (image+cue)
Label: Philips
Size: 553 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: no

Disc: 1
01. Nocturne in b flat, Op.9 No.1
02. Nocturne in E flat, Op.9 No.2
03. Nocturne in B, Op.9 No.3
04. Nocturne in F, Op.15 No.1
05. Nocturne in F#, Op.15 No.2
06. Nocturne in g, Op.15 No.3
07. Nocturne in c#, Op.27 No.1
08. Nocturne in D flat, Op.27 No.2
09. Nocturne in B, Op.32 No.1
10. Nocturne in A flat, Op.32 No.2
11. Nocturne in g, Op.37 No.1
12. Nocturne in G, Op.37 No.2
13. Nocturne in c, Op.48 No.1

Disc: 2
01. Nocturne in f#, Op.48 No.2
02. Nocturne in f, Op.55 No.1
03. Nocturne in E flat, Op.55 No.2
04. Nocturne in B, Op.62 No.1
05. Nocturne in E, Op.62 No.2
06. Nocturne in e, Op.72 No.1
07. Nocturne in c#, Op.posth
08. Nocturne in c, Op.posth
09. Barcarolle in F#, Op.60
10. Fant in f, Op.49

One of the best

I’ve owned Arrau’s nocturnes ever since they were first released on vinyl. They are an old man’s Chopin, in the best sense–reflective, melancholy, aching. Arrau investigates the local detail in these inexhaustible pieces to a degree just short–an important qualification–of mannered, and so may not be to everyone’s taste (compared, say, to Rubenstein). But Arrau’s control and elegance keep him just on the right side of that emotional knife-edge, lending great poignancy to the performances and keeping them interesting on repeated hearings. The only weakness for years had been the constricted frequency extremes of the Phillips recording, which is noticeably improved on this higher-resolution remastering, especially in the ethereal upper registers. It still can’t compete with the richness of David Jones’s historic recordings of Ivan Moravec (no doubt helped by Moravec’s Bosendorfer) in what are without doubt the greatest interpretations of the nocturnes ever committed to disc. But I would not be without both, and Arrau’s readings carry the air of a world, and a performance tradition, that we will never see again.