Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) wrote 21 nocturnes along the years. As far as we know, he wrote the first of them when he was 17 years old. Along with the mazurkas and the waltzes, they may be his most recorded and most interpreted works.
The musical form known as Nocturne was first originated by irish composer John Field (1782-1837) who wrote 17 of them. It is a ternary ABA musical form, with a contrasting B section. It's usually homophonic music for piano, it means that there are two voices, one based on broken chords, used most of the time as an accompaniment, and the other one is the melody. The character of this musical form is mainly sad, melancholic or meditative.
Of all the series of Chopin's nocturnes, Nocturne in E minor, Op Posth. 72 might be the only one that's been catalogued both as an early and a late work. On one hand, Julian Fontanta, Frédéric Chopin's friend and the one in charge of publishing his posthumous works, talks about him writing it at the age of 17. On the other hand, Tadeusz Zieliński wonders whether this is the last of the nocturnes, unpublished for an unknown reason, since its emotional maturity and compositional excellence tend to show us the last years of Chopin's life and work.
Just as Zieliński does, I tend to believe this nocturne is a late work. We could also mention that, as in the nocturnes Op. 55 and 62, the B section stops being contrasting in terms of time and only certain agogic and harmonic changes remain. A late work in which agitated and demanding passages are no longer needed.
I recorded this Nocturne in October 2013. After four years it has 42,478 views and 241 'likes'. It's the most popular video in my YouTube channel:
When the idea of a blog first came to my mind, I wondered what the first entry would be about. I thought it would be nice to share my YouTube channel and to write about what I upload there. Also to talk about how I record my videos, how I decide what I will record next, etc.
Nine years ago (November 14th, 2008) I uploaded my first video, which is the live recording of my Estancias Nocturnas string trio, interpreted by The Coghlan Trio during the 28th Manuel Enríquez Foro Internacional de Música Nueva (New Music International Forum), back in 2006, at the Manuel M. Ponce concert hall in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Back in those days, it was not usual to have at hand an HD camera and 4k wasn't even invented yet. The audio recording permits weren't easy to get then. It took another two years for me to publish my second video.
I particularly like music for films, especially by composers such as Zbigniew Preisner, Eleni Karaindrou, Yann Tiersen and Giya Kancheli. So from my second video onwards, I started uploading videos of piano music by those composers. I also decided to start sharing videos of my own work, which can be mainly classified into two different styles: miniatures for soundtracks and contemporary music.
From the very first videos I uploaded, I was determined to give them a unique, unrepeatable look and so each and every video of the 60+ in my channel have a unique angle and position of the camera, as well as lighting.
To round things up, I share with you my most viewed video (42,300 views):