Nocturne No. 6 in D‑Flat Major

With his Nocturne No. 6 in D flat for piano, Fauré left behind the niceties of the salon and produced a work of deep, impassioned substance that is arguably the finest of his solo keyboard works and certainly the most often performed. Lasting about nine minutes, the piece has a sensuous, teeming lyricism that illustrates what the composer meant when he said his music wasn’t written to be played "as if the blinds were down". For all its polish and perfection, there is power here. And you feel it from the start, in an outpouring of arpeggiated, broken triads that support a yearning melody above. Developing on terms characteristic of the composer, with restless, shifting harmonies, intricately syncopated rhythms and an ambiguous sense of where the beat falls, it builds into turbulence—but then opens out into the pianistic equivalent of a theatrical set change, as clouds part and sparkling semiquaver runs underpin a transcendently high melodic line. Composed in 1894, some 10 years after No. 5, No. 6 contains writing of maturity and mastery—rising above Fauré’s expressed fears that nobody would ever want to play it. About Fauré's Nocturnes Fauré’s reputation as a composer for solo piano rests largely on the 13 Nocturnes that he composed over a span of almost half a century from 1875 to 1921: effectively the span of his creative life. Subtle and complex, with a salon intimacy, they are works of cultivated beauty that suggest a kind of pianist’s pianism: no extravagant, crowd-pleasing gestures. But their understatement and restraint contains a stifled passion, often darkly powerful. They tend to start and finish in comparative serenity but with an intervening turbulence. And though apparently unvirtuosic, they are seriously challenging to play.