Chopin Piano Sonata No. 3 – Nelson Goerner

Every so often a reissue drops through the mail slot and makes you wonder why you’d filed the original away in memory as merely “promising.” Nelson Goerner’s EMI debut, cut when the Argentine pianist was still shy of thirty, turns out to be one of those discs. Not flashy. Not interpretively contrarian in the way that gets a young player noticed on the festival circuit. Just quietly, thoroughly right in Chopin, which is the harder trick.

The Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor sits at the center of the program. Here Goerner’s particular gift declares itself: he can bend time without breaking the architecture. Too many pianists treat this sonata as a pretext for rhapsody, forgetting that Chopin was formally as rigorous as anyone since Beethoven when it suited him. Goerner never forgets. Listen to the left-hand scales climbing through the first movement, voiced with a clarity that lets you hear the harmonic floor shifting underneath the melody. Little things. They add up.

The Scherzo goes by in a blur of controlled mercury, molto vivace as marked, but never brittle. He keeps it feather-light even at speed, the kind of passagework that in lesser hands turns to glass shards. And the finale, that graveyard of good intentions where so many fine Chopin players suddenly sound like they’re just getting through it — Goerner doesn’t get through it. He shapes it. The scales that dominate the movement’s argument are there for structural reasons, not for the ovation, and he plays them that way: propulsive, purposeful, never showing off for its own sake.

Then the Polonaise-Fantaisie, op. 61, arguably Chopin’s strangest, most improvisatory-sounding large work, the one where the polonaise rhythm all but dissolves into free fantasy. The opening gestures span the keyboard with a boldness that recalls, oddly, late Liszt more than early Chopin. Goerner leans into that boldness rather than softening it. His pedaling deserves particular mention: it’s an extension of ear rather than habit, blending sonorities without smearing them. You sense he’s listening to the decay of every chord before he moves to the next.

The shorter works fill out the disc handsomely. The C minor Nocturne could easily tip into melodrama. It’s practically an invitation to overplay, and pianists from Cortot onward have occasionally taken the bait, turning four minutes of nocturnal reflection into a mini-Ballade. Goerner declines the invitation. Wisely.

But it’s the Barcarolle in F-sharp major that lingers longest after the disc stops spinning. I’ve never understood its relative neglect on recital programs. Maybe it demands too nuanced a balance between sensuous surface and structural undertow, and pianists shy from works that expose imbalance so mercilessly. Goerner has no such fear. The build to the climax feels inevitable rather than engineered, each wave of the 12/8 barcarolle rhythm gathering just a little more weight until the final pages arrive somewhere close to ecstasy. It’s an account that stands up against the classic versions, Rubinstein’s poise, Argerich’s heat, without imitating either.

The Fourth Ballade impresses too, fluid and improvisatory in the best sense. There’s a passage, I won’t say exactly where, listen for it, where Goerner seems almost to wink at the connection between this piece and the Etude in C-sharp minor, op. 25 no. 12, the oceanic one. Whether that’s calculated allusion or just the natural overlap of Chopin’s pianistic imagination, I couldn’t say. But it’s the sort of detail that rewards repeated listening, which is more than you can say for most Chopin recital discs cluttering the reissue bins these days.

Strongly, unreservedly recommended.