Voormolen: Nocturne "Eline" (1951) -- an online lesson

Most of the Voormolen's piano works were mostly composed before 1930 and this is among the later works. When compared with Piano Sonata (1944) the tone is darker and the chromatic progressions downward stand out more. The subtitle "Eline" is based on "Eline Vere", an 1889 novel by the Dutch writer Louis Couperus. It seems that Eline was an intelligent young lady, who loved book reading also a talented musician. Her propensity to be lost in her fantasy caused social and private failures, resulting in depression and deadly addiction to morphine.

Later in 1953 Voormolen orchestrated this nocturne with more material in the introduction. This orchestra version sounds colorful and rich like Richard-Strauss. Playing this with piano gives ideas about emphasizing the solitude, prayer, and occasional capriccio, but pianists must confront first with technical issues of broad cords, pedaling, and counterpoints. This is the most difficult piece of Voormolen's piano music along with Sonata.

I knew that "Eline" of piano version exists from the catalog of Voormolen's compositions on the web. Then I found a youtube clip by a dutch pianist and was shocked by the performance. Its emotional power was overwhelming. I wrote an email to the pianist asking for the score. He was on a vacation and kindly sent me the score in a couple of days. I studied the score and found out that the music itself is safely under control of the composer; the pianist's performance was extraordinary.

The music fit me quite well and I did not find any mental difficulty practicing "Eline". Still it took 3 months to prepare this clip. The 8 bars of introduction was already quite difficult and I needed an adviser. As my last piano lesson was in 2005 and the piano teacher went away, I had to find a new one. First I asked for help to a piano teacher who was a friend of mine for 25 years since my university days. She thought about the request very seriously and kindly introduced me to a professional pianist in London. He had established himself as a Rachmaninov expert and was a leading piano teacher at musical college. He kindly agreed on having an online lesson and we had a nice one by zoom and could discuss the issue of broad cords (if you can reach the cord, you practice the balance. Do not escape to arpeggio pretending you cannot reach), priorities of music playing (melody first, naturally), melody shaping and so on. Concrete advises on tempo changing were indispensable. I could not manage them in a natural way though many indications of rit. accel., piu mosso, stringendo, allargando ... appeared in the score. He also referred to importance of playing before audience and "making it interesting".

My youtube version is OK, but there are places the music does not go smoothly. So I upload another version (audio only) in this site.

instrument: Yamaha C5x