nocturne

Granat-Pearce said the portrait of her son as a hard-partying nocturne that emerged in court was not the boy she raised.

His recordings of Chopin’s études and nocturnes offer lovely, generally introverted, smoothed, even sleepy takes on those works.

While Blanchard’s score moved comfortably between bars, college parties and fraught, tender nocturnes, “Fire” was fairly turgid as drama, its individual sequences clear but the broader conflicts driving its characters obscure.

Jacobs’s textures were also beautifully varied in the “Prière,” the trumpet mellowed by the vast space without losing its focus; the “Prélude, Fugue et Variation” was a wistful nocturne, sensitively controlled and never overblown.

The experience is no less expansive than seeing the ocean or hearing a Chopin nocturne for the first time.