A listener expecting to hear novel interpretations and impeccable renditions of Chopin’s music will find them on The Chopin Project, only in unanticipated contexts. Five of the nine pieces on the recording are by Chopin; the remaining tracks are arrangements or compositions based on Chopin’s works for string quintet, piano and synthesizers by Ólafur Arnalds, the producer-composer behind the project. Ambient noises, such as those of muted conversations, natural breathing or damper pedal also sound throughout the album.

These sounds, as if of memories nearly forgotten, lead me to hear the recording through a nostalgic lens, in the sense of Svetlana Boym’s definition of nostalgia as a longing for that which no longer exists or has never existed.Footnote ¹ On The Chopin Project, Arnalds pushes back against the notion that a classical studio recording should be a technically flawless rendition of a live performance. Chopin’s music provides him and pianist Alice Sara Ott a starting point to experiment with sound and recording techniques within the realm of Western art music. The result of these experiments is fascinating and haunting; the album deflects attention from Chopin’s compositions and their execution by Ott and draws it elsewhere – to the act of recording, the sound of prepared pianos, traces of Chopin’s style in Arnolds’s music, layered images of the CD packaging and so on. The recording simultaneously enacts both loss and a sense of new possibilities.

The prevailing mood of the recording is bittersweet and intimate. The first sound heard on the CD is not that of a piano but a cello carving a hesitant melody; the sound lingers like a dim echo in a hollow space (likely a result of a delay audio effect), while other strings blend in with fluid contrapuntal lines (‘Verses’, track 1). Track 2 introduces Ott, the soloist, performing the slow movement from Chopin’s Third Piano Sonata, which, at over nine minutes, is the longest track on the album. Moving forward, Ott and the quintet combine forces on three nocturnes and Arnalds’s musings; they too are mixed with extra sound effects, culminating, on the last track, with the Prelude in D-flat major op. 28, no. 15 (‘Raindrop’).

The selection of three tranquil piano nocturnes along with two other Chopin pieces that derive from the nocturne genre is significant. Chopin’s piano nocturnes are pleasing instrumental songs, feature embellished melodies and delicate accompaniments, and follow a ternary form. As Jeffrey Kallberg has shown, nineteenth-century critics and consumers of nocturnes linked the pieces with the feminine sphere of domestic piano performance and construed the filigree melodies and agitated middle sections to evoke night-time seduction and romantic entanglements.Footnote ² But Chopin also often undermined and confounded the conventions of the genre and their implied social meanings, as all Chopin pieces on this recording show.Footnote ³ Chorales replace the passionate B sections in Nocturne in G minor op. 37, no. 1 (track 5) and Nocturne in C minor op. 48, no. 1 (track 6), and Chopin inserts destabilizing mazurka rhythms and triple metre midway through his Nocturne in C sharp minor (track 3). Conversely, his slow sonata movement is a nocturne, while the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude arguably teeters between the boundaries of genres. In all, the nocturne as a ‘host’ genre lends the Arnalds/Ott recording its gentle, atmospheric intimacy.

Arnalds amplifies the liberties Chopin took with genre mixing and arranges these particular selections in startling ways. The Nocturne in C sharp minor (track 3) features violinist Mari Samuelsen, who substitutes for the piano part. When the nocturne reaches the mazurka-like middle section, Arnolds shortens it. Samuelsen plays it lyrically, which strips the mazurka of its rugged dance character. The Nocturne in G minor (track 5), halfway through the recording, layers Ott’s interpretation with a shimmering sound (possibly rain, a turning vinyl record or the sound of the distant train implied by the cover art, perhaps), laughter, and murmurs of an inaudible conversation. Track 5 stops short of the chorale midway through the Nocturne in G minor. By contrast, the Nocturne in C minor (‘Eyes Shut’, track 6) is heard through its solemn chorale. Ott’s piano appears about two minutes into this track, the strings eventually merge with the piano, and the piece finishes open-ended. Listeners may also be struck by an overwhelming sense of familiarity upon their first encounter with the recording. For example, the appropriately named ‘Reminiscence’ (track 4) uses melodic fragments from Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor, played on the preceding track; Ott ceaselessly repeats the arpeggiated bass line and improvises a lyrical melody, while strings linger on the long-sustained notes of the theme. Arnalds’s variations on Chopin’s compositions add to the sense of overlapping temporalities and nostalgic longings.

The album art reinforces these impressions of nostalgia.Footnote ⁴ The images are uniformly dark and layered with textured effects: dust, fingerprints, lens flares, and other synthetic ‘imperfections’ are added to the base photographs – an aesthetic that is similar to Boym’s use of cinematic double exposure as a metaphor for nostalgia. In the cover image of the CD case, Ott wears a black jacket, while looking to her left. Arnalds stands behind her in a crisp white shirt buttoned all the way up, looking over his right shoulder. A blurred low contrast train – a locomotive pulling freight cars – can be seen over Arnalds’s and Ott’s heads; a heavy vignette and a textured layer effect are added, except over the duo’s faces. In turn, the back image of the booklet presents two silhouetted black birds flying off together, presumably as winged stand-ins for Arnalds’s and Ott’s collaboration. This style of photography draws heavily from the photographic movement known as Pictorialism. In the 1890s, when easy-to-use Kodak cameras facilitated the rise of amateurs, professional photographers reacted by creating soft images with visible brush strokes and other alterations. This visual framing of the Arnolds/Ott collaboration thus captures their ethos of reactive innovation.Footnote ⁵

Half of the six images inside the booklet draw attention to the piano and inadvertently to the sound of the piano – or sound, more generally – on the recording. One image is of the interior of a grand piano, another of Ott’s hands on the keys, and a third of her at a Kallmann spinet. Each image also registers the work that went into ‘preparing’ the pianos for recording. Microphones are placed inside the sound board of the grand piano, and the missing front lid on what appears to be an upright reveals the full key action. The sound quality resulting from these manipulations is purposefully fuzzy (track 5), metallic (track 9) or muffled (track 4). The close proximity of the microphone to the piano strings records the effect of every change of the sustaining pedal. Ott’s breathless vocalization on ‘Eyes Shut’ is also caught on the recording. The very act of recording becomes, as Arnalds suggests in his liner notes, ‘a ghost performer in itself’. Moreover, the pianos selected for the project are generally softer and duller than modern concert grands, and closer in sound to the fortepianos (especially the Pleyels) that Chopin himself preferred.

In sum, The Chopin Project is at once innovative and strangely familiar; it is a Chopin recording and oddly not one at all; it promotes Ott but draws attention to the technological mediation of her performance; and it is imbued with the melancholia that arises from the impossibility of returning to the past. In the liner notes, Arnolds conjures up memories of his late grandmother who had introduced him to Chopin. He remembers (or perhaps idealizes) listening to a Chopin sonata with her just before she passed away. Arnolds and Ott also turned to Chopin because the prospect of hearing his music differently and anew appealed to them. Ott’s interpretations may not be particularly innovative, but the way they are recorded may strike some listeners (like my octogenarian father-in-law and avid Chopin aficionado) as disorienting or at least surprising, and a little sad, too.

In the same way that the aesthetic movement Pictorialism is currently seen as a skilled visual response by professionals to the ease of mechanical reproduction brought about by the Kodak camera, the Arnalds/Ott collaboration is a response to ubiquity of pristine recordings in contemporary renditions of the classical genre. The resultant Chopin Project lives up to the Mercury Classics’s pursuit of distinctive and fresh perspectives to Western art music.