Nelson Goerner Plays Chopin
EMI Debut CDZ5 69701–2
There are pianists who play Chopin, and then there are pianists who inhabit him. Nelson Goerner, Argentinian-born and trained partly under Nelson Freire — that lineage matters — belongs, on this evidence, firmly in the second category.
He was 28 when this was recorded. You can hear it, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
Youth in a Chopin interpreter is a double-edged thing. Too often it produces either reckless abandon or, worse, the self-conscious caution of someone trying to sound old. Goerner sidesteps both traps entirely. What he brings instead is something rarer: a freshness of instinct married to genuine structural intelligence — the sense that he’s hearing these pieces new while simultaneously understanding exactly how they’re built. Chopin’s architecture, those carefully proportioned long lines and the harmonic logic underneath all that ornament, is something too many pianists simply ignore, to their considerable peril.
The Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor anchors the program. In the first movement, those ascending left-hand scales — a passage where lesser players produce mere passage-work — are voiced with an exquisiteness that stops you cold. Each note weighted differently, the line breathing. The Scherzo, marked Molto vivace, is both blazingly fast and somehow weightless, which is nearly impossible and which Goerner makes sound inevitable. The Finale — that strange, two-handed unison whisper that has baffled commentators since 1840 — is where most pianists either over-explain or simply flee. Goerner neither explains nor flees. He trusts it.
The Polonaise-Fantasie is a different animal altogether. Not virtuosity in the conventional sense but something more precarious — a work that can collapse into incoherence if the pianist doesn’t hold its contradictions in a single dramatic arc. Goerner’s pedaling here is worth particular attention. It’s completely subordinate to what his inner ear demands, never decorative, never reflexive. The opening gestures, spread across the full keyboard with real boldness, announce immediately that this is going to be an interpretation of consequence.
Among the shorter pieces — the C minor Nocturne, the B-flat minor Scherzo, the Barcarolle, the Fourth Ballade — there’s consistently fine playing, though not everything glitters equally. The Nocturne resists the quasi-Ballade theatrics that tempt so many pianists in that C minor darkness. Good. The Fourth Ballade flows with genuine fantasy, and at one remarkable moment Goerner seems almost deliberately to surface the kinship with the Étude, Op. 25, No. 12 — a structural observation made through pure sound rather than analysis.
But the Barcarolle. This is the reading that will stay with you.
Why this piece isn’t played at every major recital is genuinely beyond me. In F-sharp major — already a tonality of shimmer and displacement — Chopin built something that moves from rocking lullaby to near-erotic climax with an inexorability that, in the right hands, feels like fate. Goerner’s hands are the right hands. The accumulation of tension is patient, inevitable, and when the climax arrives it arrives with the force of something that couldn’t have happened any other way.
Strongly recommended — with the Barcarolle alone worth the price of the disc several times over.
