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Chopin: Scherzo No.1 in B minor, Op.20 (Paleczny, Shirinyan, Grosvenor, Petrov)

In large part Chopin’s scherzos are studies in rarefied violence (well, not so much the last), but even among them the Op.20 stands out. Its outer sections are by far the most dissonant in the scherzos, and also the most reliant on pure texture (as opposed to melody or gesture) as a musical language. That roided-up Mannheim rocket figure at m.13, for instance, is just the tonic chord. Yet its static harmony is expanded into a hemiola (most obvious in the LH) alongside an implied two-voice texture in the RH, comprising a lower line of (lower) chromatic neighbours resolving up, and a upper line of descending appoggiaturas. At speed it’s pretty exhilarating – you don’t hear the detail, just a headlong blitz up the keyboard. Similarly, the passage that begins at m.69 is almost senseless on a note-by-note basis, but at speed its heady mix of chromatic neighbours and arpeggio figures push to the fore a strange, acrid melody (if you can call it that). This scherzo is Chopin’s most structurally straightforward – it’s just an extended ternary form – but perhaps because of that, the contrast between its outer sections and the trio is the starkest of any of the scherzos. The (heavily modified) Polish carol that forms in middle features a lovely upper pedal F# that occasionally (and very elegantly) takes on melodic duties of its own, and segues back into the scherzo material by shockingly recalling the two stark chords that open the work. The coda is worth a special mention too – it’s perhaps fitting that given how obsessed this work is with chromatic neighbours, you get a terrifying, written-out octave trill on a low C# before series of nine German aug 6 chords screaming above a F# pedal (m.594; 10:25). It’s all an astonishingly beautiful sort of ugly. 00:00 – Paleczny. Clarity, playfulness. He’s got something of a love affair with nonchord tones – you can hear the way at m.9 (and similar points, see 1:33) they resolve in the LH, and in the Bm descent at m.601 (10:30) the appoggiaturas stand out with surprising clarity. The tempo is (by modern standards) moderate, the tone never ugly, and the phrasing often quite rhetorical (see for instance the beginning of the RH descent at m.16). 10:53 – Shirinyan. Full of beguiling detail, countermelodies in particular. See for instance m.125 (13:17), where she conjures a chromatic enclosure of the F# in the LH for a wonderfully odd, lurching effect, and the dying phrase of the trio at m.374 (18:15), where the LH unobtrusively nudges the harmony on. Also interesting how the pauses after each RH run in the opening are prolonged very slightly but very noticeably – it creates a certain anticipation for the next phrase that’s quite compelling. 21:58 – Grosvenor. Gestural, dizzying. At first blush it’s the absurd speed that makes an impression, but it’s really a way of bringing out higher-order detail, such as large-scale melodic patterning and phrase shape. The melodies and textural changes of the A2 section, for instance (22:45 and onward) stand out as much as they do because of the blazing tempo. The speed also creates some lovely effects, such as the bass crunch that begins the runs at m.505 (28:59). The phrasing is free and very rhetorical, both in the outer sections (m.46; 22:22) and in the trio, where the melody almost sounds improvised. The coda is spectacular; the C# trill has real bite, the aug 6 chords are played like a spasm, and in the final run you can actually hear the tritone accents Chopin indicates. 30:12 – Petrov. Fierce. Nearly as fast as Grosvenor, but the mood is darker. He does not shy away from violence: the chords that end the trio are genuinely frightening (36:55), and the aug 6 chords in the coda (38:07) are incoherent stabs of pure noise. Where Grosvenor finds fleet-footed play, here there is headlong tumult. And yet the trio is the most luminous of any rendition I know: the melodic voice is emphasised a little more than is usual, and when it transfers briefly to the upper (pedal) voice the effect is really touching.