Beloved Nocturne
One of Chopin’s most beautiful and beloved pieces is his Nocturne in E-flat Major, Op. 9, No. 2. I performed it for my high-school senior recital in the spring of 1966, but did not perform it again or practice it seriously for another half-century. Yet this Romantic gem was never far from my consciousness.
Then in the spring of 2017 I began noticing a lot of questions from piano students in social media about the piece, especially about how to do Chopin’s rubato and how to handle the grace notes in the cadenza near the end. So I decided to record my own interpretation, getting the piece back under my fingers over a couple of weeks and then adding it to a recording session that April. I uploaded the recording to YouTube on June 18, 2017.
Chopin’s rubato, in my opinion, needs to flow naturally from the demands of the music itself. I use it to give shape to the phrases and emphasize key cadences.
The trickiest part of the cadenza is the repeating four-note pattern (C♭, B♭, C♮, A♮). My younger self in 1966 had no trouble executing this figure with the standard 3241 fingering, but this time I experimented with a two-handed approach. I found one that works well, bringing out the natural accentuation of the pattern. For the curious student: I take the initial C♭ with the second finger of the left hand. The B♭ and C♮ are then taken with 2 and 3 of the right hand, A♮ and C♭ with 3 and 2 of the left hand, and so on. The right hand is sopra, hovering over the black keys, while the left hand is sotto and nearer the edges of the keys. I have also taught this fingering to a student with excellent results. It is indicated in red below.
At the end of the cadenza, the last four grace notes are notated as longer values (eighth-note grace notes), and I really like to stretch these out, especially the nostalgic penultimate C, which heralds the concluding leading tone and tonic.
My playing of this passage can be viewed beginning around 4:07 in the video: