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Chopin: Scherzo No.2 in Bb minor, Op.31 (Yundi, Sultanov, Grosvenor, Pogorelich, Dang Thai Son)

The Op.31 scherzo belongs to a handful of Chopin works written at such a pitch of inspiration that thinking about it in any kind of detail makes me feel a little sick. It’s the most gestural of Chopin’s scherzos, the most willing to juxtapose huge variations in register, dynamic, and texture within a very short musical span. It’s the most reliant on silence; the A1 section of this work is replete with long, menacing pauses that are equally effective when played rhetorically or kept (more or less – nobody actually follows this strictly) in tempo. It also contains extended passages of figural brilliance: the B3 section (m.334) miraculously blurs together melody, figuration, and texture in a way that Chopin started doing more and more in his later works. Perhaps a bit less obviously, this is the most structurally complex scherzo Chopin wrote. For a start, the work revolves around two key motifs that get aggressively developed throughout the work, and which are revealed in its climactic passages to be variants of each other. Then there’s the fact that this apparent scherzo incorporates a lot of argumentative/developmental sonata logic: in fact the latter part of the “trio” contains what might just be the greatest development section written in what is technically a non-sonata. And in case the sonata connection wasn’t obvious enough, that development ends with a huge dominant preparation Beethovenian in its obsessiveness and intensity. Most spectacularly (if least audibly?), Chopin does something here which only Beethoven (in the Hammerklavier) and Schubert (in the D960) had pulled off prior, and for my money I think he does a better job at it: unifying short-term coloristic detail and long-range tonal patterning. The flattened 6th scale degree plays a major coloristic/dramatic role in this work: it pops up first in m.22, and then returns at multiple points thereafter (mm.352, 719, 759, 770). And the reason for its prominence is that while this work is nominally in Bb min, large sections revolve around a complex of three keys separated by a major 3rd: Db, A, and F (F – kinda. It’s really more heard as the dominant of Bb). And in each of these keys, the b6 provides the tonic of the next. It’s almost possible to see this all as a coincidence, except that Chopin comes clean on the joke in the final bars, where he briefly (using a C dom 7) tonicizes F properly for the first time before resolving the F chord’s upper A (like a b6) to Ab and shifting the harmony back to the dominant of Db. It’s a "ta-da!" move that exploits both the enharmonic ambiguity of Bbb/A, and underscores the mediant relationship between the main keys of the work. (For what it’s worth, Chopin also pays off the very first b6 you hear – that Gb in m.22; because the entry of the first real melody in the work turns out to be in Gb (m.65). Funny too that the notes are the same as in the D960: Schubert goes from a Gb trill to F, Chopin goes from F to Gb.) 00:00 – Yundi 10:02 – Sultanov 19:46 – Grosvenor 28:56 – Pogorelich 39:31 – Dang Thai Son