ERIC GREENE (Tenor)
OLGA THOMAS (Pianoforte)
THE names of Field and Chopin side by side point, the fact that the Nocturne was the invention not of the composer whose works have made the title so familiar to us, but of the Irishman, John Field , whose first Nocturne came out when Chopin was a little boy. Field lived for a time in Russia with Clementi, in whose pianoforte warehouse he demonstrated the qualities of instruments. When Clementi left Russia, Field became a well-known teacher in St. Petersburg. He toured in Europe, took to drink, lost his health, and died, at the age of fifty-five, ill 1837.
FOUNTAINS, written in 1901, when Ravel was twenty-six, was the first piece in which he showed his brilliant powers in pianoforte writing.
It has for preface a few words calling up the sight of one of those sculptured, happy water-gods we have seen smiling beneficently in the midst of an ornamental fountain.