Pianist Alice Sara Ott’s delight in having ‘discovered’ John Field is evident in her bubbling enthusiasm as she recalls the effect of first hearing his music: “It was music that I didn’t know at all, and still there was something familiar and nostalgic about it.”
While in isolation during the COVID pandemic, Ott in a “very frustrated mood” had decided to try a composer she didn’t know but had heard of: “I thought Field’s Nocturnes would match this mood,” she tells Apple Music Classical, “but then it turned out to be uplifting—I just couldn't stop smiling when I listened to his music.”
The early 19th-century Irish pianist and composer, John Field, is already widely known by reputation, at least, for inventing the Nocturne, a now well-established genre of piano piece. But for Field, making his career across Europe and especially in Tsarist Russia, the Nocturne was a perfect vehicle for the poetic yet directly communicative style of his playing.
The Nocturne was famously taken up by Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, whose own contribution to that genre has been recorded by many pianists. Yet Field’s music was no mere foreshadowing of Chopin’s, as Ott realised when she first heard his music: “I couldn’t even place it in a period. I couldn't tell if it was 18th-century Classical or 19th-century Romantic, because some of Field’s Nocturnes sounded like Mozart or as if by a younger Beethoven.”
Notwithstanding such comparisons, Field’s Nocturnes cast their own spell—one that seems to work no matter the audience, as Ott discovered when she introduced them to Japan. “I was very nervous,” she recalls, “because it almost felt as if I was going to premiere a contemporary piece that nobody had heard before. Probably 99 per cent of the audience had never heard of John Field before. I was watching their faces while I was playing some of the nocturnes, and they actually reacted the same way as I did—they just started smiling from the beginning until the end.”
Given the direct and apparently unassuming style of Field’s Nocturnes, what is the secret of their apparently universal appeal? “Almost every one of them starts in a very simple way,” says Ott, “and you’re tricked into thinking, ‘This is rather simple-structured music’. Then he manages to surprise you with a harmonic or rhythmical twist. And there’s no one who masters the art of ornamentation the way he does—even Chopin doesn’t come close, it seems to me.”
Indeed, much of the fascination of Field’s Nocturnes lies in the almost improvisatory filigree with which he decorated his music—which for Ott presented the greatest challenge. “It was something I had to work at more than if I was playing, for example, Liszt’s (notoriously virtuosic) Sonata, which I find somehow easier for me physically. With all Field’s ornamentation, there are different possibilities, and depending on what choice you make, it has such an impact on the general mood of the piece. I experimented so many different ways of playing these ornaments, and trying to find the right way for myself was not always easy.”
Ott’s love for the music has grown in the process, while she has gained some insight into Field the pianist: “In his time, people everywhere were just talking about what an incredible performer he was,” says Ott, “You can hear from the ornamentation that he really was an improvisational master.”
What also makes Field’s music special for Ott is the occasional glimpse of hidden depths of feeling. “Almost every nocturne of his starts very innocently, very naively,” she says. “Then he creates this magic in half a bar of music, where you sense this profound melancholia. It’s almost like you’re walking by a window, and then beyond the glass you sense an emotion that can be sadness or melancholy, but you cannot grasp the whole complexity and the depth of it. It lasts just a half bar, and then the sun comes out again.”
So which Nocturnes does Ott suggest trying to give a flavour of Field’s range? Ott instantly cites as “one of my absolute favourites” No. 10, the song-like and poignant “Nocturne Pastorale” in E major. And she’s grown to love No. 16 in C major: “It’s one of the longer Nocturnes, and in the beginning I was like, ‘Oh, there's so many different sections, and I don't know how to make them work together’. For me, it's like an opera, because it has so many different moods. You present these different scenes and suddenly there’s a singer coming in with a coloratura or Baroque-style aria that Cecilia Bartoli might be singing. And then it becomes, again, very pianistic. It's just full of changes, and that's what I love about it.”
