Chopin's music, especially the directly dance-related waltzes, draws performances ranging from those that present the music as notated to those that take the score essentially as a stimulus to further creative activity. These readings of 14 waltzes (all the commonly played ones) by American pianist
David Northington definitely lie toward the former end of the spectrum, but
Northington has ways of making a personal contribution to the music. Typically he starts off a waltz with circumspect rhythms that you could almost take down to class at Arthur Murray, but then midway through the piece he introduces freer treatment of the rhythm -- either in a subsidiary theme close to the beginning, or in the main theme of a contrasting central area, or both. The results are far from the sweeping
Chopin of
Rubinstein and his contemporaries, but they produce an intimate feeling of commentary, conversation, and subtle decoration that one can easily enough imagine being heard in a Parisian salon. It is the shorter but multisectional pieces that fare best; the "Minute Waltz" Waltz in D flat major, Op. 64, No. 1 is not quite as evanescent as it should be, and the bigger, longer ones are somewhat laid-back. Everything
Northington does rests on a foundation of solid technical equipment, however, and the listener looking for a quieter set of
Chopin waltzes should give these a spin. The booklet is less than satisfactory.
Northington's notes are too quick to assign autobiographical significance to these pieces (the Romantics saw music as an escape from a world that "is too much with us," not just as an inscription of life as it went by), and the layout is amateurish, with some of the type squeezed within an inch of its life.