Three nocturnes, Op. 9 [16:07]
Nocturne No. 4, Op. 15 No. 1 [4:36]
Barcarolle in F sharp, Op. 60 [9:09]
Two nocturnes, Op. posth. [7:25]
Nocturne No. 13 in C minor, Op. 48 No. 1 [6:25]
Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52 [11:31]
Impromptu No. 1 in A flat, Op. 29 [3:46]
Fantaisie-Impromptu in C sharp minor, Op. 66 [5:07]
Polonaise in A flat Heroique, Op. 53 [6:50]
Valse in A flat L’adieu Op. 69 No. 1 [3:41]
Dai Asai (piano)
rec. dates unknown, Studio Halle, Germany
EUROARTS EA3012 [74:32]
Chopin is one of those composers who can make a young pianist look either very good or very bad, sometimes within the same phrase. The music offers no hiding place — every technical inadequacy, every emotional vacancy, every excess of sentiment stands exposed the moment the pedal goes down. So it’s worth saying plainly that Dai Asai passes the first test. He plays this music as music, not as an obstacle course or a showcase, and that is genuinely not nothing.
The nocturnes open the program. Seven of them.
This is where the trouble starts — not in the playing itself, which is often lovely, but in the programming logic, which seems almost willfully resistant to contrast. Chopin wrote the nocturnes across three decades of his short life; they are not a homogeneous species. The Op. 9 set has an exploratory quality, the influence of John Field still hovering at the edges. The late nocturnes, Op. 55 and beyond, are harmonically far stranger, shadowed by illness and isolation, and they reward a very different interpretive weight. Asai tends to smooth these distinctions, to find a single lyrical tone — luminous, yes, polished, certainly — and sustain it across pieces that really want to speak in different registers. By the fourth nocturne I found myself slightly lulled, and lulled is not what Chopin intended.
The Barcarolle follows, and here there is more to admire. Asai has genuine feeling for the long melodic arc, and he manages the gradual intensification of the middle section with care. But something is missing — the sense that we are hearing, as Chopin almost certainly intended, a private ecstasy played out just barely within the bounds of formal propriety. The piece wants a certain dangerous freedom. It gets, instead, very good manners.
Then the Ballade No. 4 in F minor — and this is where the recording’s central limitation becomes impossible to ignore. The Fourth Ballade is, by almost universal consent, one of the supreme achievements in the literature for solo piano: a tragic narrative of extraordinary compression, building from a hesitant opening question through accumulating psychological dread to a coda of almost frightening violence. Asai negotiates the architecture accurately enough. But it sounds small. Miniaturized, as if the whole drama has been pressed into a velvet box. Part of the problem is the recorded acoustic — dry, close, studio-bound in the most confining sense, with the Steinway caught in a space that seems barely larger than the instrument itself. Rubinstein’s old RCA recording had a room around it; even Pollini’s notably cool DG traversal — not everyone’s idea of idiomatic Chopin — had air and dimension. This album has neither.
The “Heroic” Polonaise in A flat, Op. 53, arrives near the end and briefly suggests another pianist altogether. There is real swagger in the octave passages, a sense of physical presence that the nocturnes largely withheld. One suspects Asai is a more commanding figure in a concert hall than he is in a recording studio — the microphone has flattened something, robbed the playing of the projection and spatial drama that a live audience would supply.
He recovers some ground in the final waltz, where his genuine lyrical instinct and his sensitivity to inner voices remind you that talent is unquestionably here. The tone is warm, the phrasing natural rather than applied.
EuroArts, to judge by their promotional materials, is more interested in the recording technology than in the music. That imbalance shows in the result. A pianist who clearly has things to say about Chopin has been placed in an acoustic that limits what he can say. Whether that is bad luck or bad judgment is hard to determine from the outside — but it is bad news for this particular release. Asai deserves another chance, in a bigger room, with a producer willing to let the music breathe. This recording is a beginning, not a document.
