Field: Piano Sonatas, Variations, Rondo, Waltz – Tyler Hay

The Irish-born composer John Field is still celebrated today as ‘the father of the nocturne’ for his creation of a genre which went on to inspire Chopin and generations of Romantic-era composers for the piano.
Field’s own talents at the piano were recognised early, when the boy was just nine years old, and further nurtured by Muzio Clementi when the Italian-born, London-resident composer and publisher took him on as a pupil. Thus although the first three of Field’s sonatas date from 1801, when he was still a teenager, they are the fruit of a decade-long devotion to the art and craft of music.
Unpretentious in form and melodic profile, each of these two-movement sonatas opens with a sonata movement sounding near to Beethoven in one of his milder moods, though No.2 presents a theme which strikingly anticipates one of Schubert’s late impromptus. The musing character of these movements is then answered by a toe-tapping minuet, as if to banish all care.
While sharing the proportions of these Op.1 pieces, Sonata No.4 is a standalone work dating from 16 years later, once Field was installed in St Petersburg as a high-living pianist to the Imperial Court. The passing of time might account for the gentler nature and richer harmony of the Fourth Sonata’s second movement.
These neglected pieces only came to wider attention during the 1970s, when they were first recorded, and the discovery of them will still delight any collector of early-Romantic pianism. On this new recording, Tyler Hay prefaces each Sonata with a shorter piece demonstrating the range of Field’s talents and expressive palette. There is the Rondo on Del Caro’s Hornpipe; a Yearning Waltz; a set of Variations on a Russian Folksong; and finally a ruminative Andante inédit in E flat which, like the best of his work, looks forward to the era of Chopin and Schumann in asserting the stature of the pianist as a poet of the keyboard.
“Tyler Hay has brilliantly mastered and assimilated these often elusive scores.” Gramophone, July 2018 (on the piano works of John Ogdon, for Piano Classics)