in which the share of eternity in us can blossom in a sort of timelessness."
Dimiter Terziev
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| THE NOCTURNE SPIRIT | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ����������� Noctis, the Latin word for "Night", is the easily recognizable root of the term "Nocturne". Yet, to assume that Night is the main character in this arguably most romantic of all piano music genres, is like assuming that darkness in the theatre hall is the protagonist of the play. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ����������� Night and Darkness have acquired ambivalent status in the human psyche. On the one hand they are associated with Death, Evil and Fear, on the other hand they are prerequisites for expressing the most personal and intimate feelings. As Philippe Mougeot nicely puts it: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| "Night abolishes material forms and suspends all activity, creating a spatial time | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| esential to the inner self, thus made whole and once more able to enter the spiritual order . . . in which the share of eternity in us can blossom in a sort of timelessness." |
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| ���������� Night is a creator of depth and significance. Imagine the Last Supper as "Last Breakfast", and it will lose its mystical appeal; imagine a performance of Hamlet or Macbeth in bright daylight, and they will lose their expressive depth. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ����������� The nocturne genre is deeply connected to the feelings and images of� Romanticism. As such, it reflects one of its most quintessential images, defined as "infinite longing for an ideal state of being; that is, the image in all its potential manifestations of the gulf between desire and fulfilment." | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ����������Of course, the above definition can not claim to exhaust the entire emotional content of a nocturne, let alone of the entire genre. After all, it has been around for almost two centuries, and it has been affected by the composers' diverse personalities and cultural backgrounds.� | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| �����������There is a span of more than 120 years between the earliest and the latest piece recorded on this CD, and each composer comes from a different ethnic origin - Irish, Polish, Hungarian, French, Russian, French Canadian, English Canadian and Bulgarian. There is also a great diversity of the composers' age at the time of creating these pieces.� Yet, unity is created by� their common romantic spirit; a spirit which unfolds like unbroken thread from the charming simplicity of Field through the melodic genius of Chopin to the lush harmonies of Pepin, Morley and Vladigerov. Dimiter Terziev |
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| For Reference: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Philippe Mougeot, Notes for Chopin - Nocturnes and Preludes, Samson Francois, EMI Classics, 1987 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Maynard Solomon, Late Beethoven: Music, Thought Imagination, Some Romantic Images (University of California Press, 2003), 46 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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