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Tom Hicks is not exactly new to these pages, though until now, he has been represented in Fanfare by only two albums—one pairing works by Tchaikovsky and John Ireland, the other a crossover disc of solo piano pieces by Camden Reeves—both far removed from Chopin and neither of them on the present Divine Art record label. Hicks’s official website, however, tells a fuller story of his recording activities.

In another Divine Art album released in 2022, but apparently not reviewed in Fanfare, Hicks took on Liszt’s formidable Piano Sonata in B Minor, coupled it with the seldom heard Piano Sonata in E Minor by Ireland, and filled out the CD with a handful of small gems by Rebecca Clarke, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Charles Stanford.

But that’s not all. As recently as last year (2024), Hicks recorded yet another album, this one titled Terpsichore’s Box of Dreams, a CD devoted to the music of Augusta Read. It was named BBC Music Magazine Album of the Month and was nominated for three Grammys.

In case you’re wondering why the heavy emphasis on British composers, yes, Tom Hicks is Guernsey-born and bred, Manchester trained, Yale University groomed by Boris Berman, and Northwestern University finished, earning his Doctorate in Musical Arts degree in December 2021. Awards, prizes, and more than 60 appearances as concerto soloist and chamber music participant followed.

With his new two-disc Divine Art album of Chopin’s complete nocturnes, Hicks has taken on one of the composer’s most treasurable contributions to the solo piano repertoire and some of his most personal and intimate musical utterances. As the music historians tell us, and is agreed by most, Chopin did not invent the nocturne. Credit for that goes to John Field (1782–1837), 28 years Chopin’s senior. Field may have been the first to give the name “nocturne” to some 18 pieces he composed in a style that generally featured a singing melody line over an arpeggiated or chordal accompaniment in a slowish temp, but such pieces were part of a larger body of early Romantic-period “mood music” types of compositions that would be expanded upon and newly coined titles added as another generation of composers came of age.

But even before Field, the term nocturne, or some derivative thereof of, is encountered in the titles of musical works, a prime example being Mozart’s Serenade, K. 239, titled “Serenata notturna.” But there and then the word carried a different meaning. It wasn’t intended to describe the mood or character of the music, but rather its functional purpose—i.e., the occasion for which it was written. The word was associated with evening or nighttime al fresco dining and entertainments, especially during the summer months when they’d have been held outdoors to escape the heat of living quarters before there was air-conditioning.

Mozart’s nocturnal serenade was just such a work, but its musical content and style were hardly of the “twilight last gleaming” variety that Field and then Chopin conjured for their nocturnes. I suppose you could say that Mozart’s serenade, which was probably performed for a gathering of guests on the hacienda’s veranda, is a sort of mood music, but it’s a mood elevator, full of high spirits, humorous elements, and an odd assortment of instruments consisting of solo and orchestral strings plus timpani. Both Field and Chopin, who followed Field’s lead, had something different in mind for their nocturnes—mood downers or at least soothers.

Chopin’s Nocturnes are 21 in number, which aren’t that many compared to his Mazurkas, but they occupied him for most of his active career, for almost 20 years, from 1827 to 1846. Because they weren’t all written at once, they were split up and published among several different opus numbers which do not, in all cases, correspond to their actual dates of composition. The first consideration then of the pianist who sets out to perform them complete is the order in which to present them. Hicks chooses what is probably the most logical and sensible way of proceeding, which is straightforwardly by opus number. So, he begins his journey with the three Nocturnes published as op. 9, Nos. 1–3. Next, he takes up the three Nocturne published as op. 15, Nos. 1–3. From there, all but the last three nocturnes were published in pairs—two each in opp. 27, 32, 37, 48, 55, and 62. The final three were only published after Chopin’s death, and so they entered his catalog as opp. posth.

Longtime readers may recall that in past reviews I’ve expressed a certain mild disaffection for Chopin’s music. It’s not that I don’t find it beautiful. It is and I do. But I find that much of it makes me feel sad and depressed in a bad way, while I experience sadness in the music by other composers in a good way. With that in mind, I wasn’t sure I could take almost two hours of Chopin’s oh-so-sad-and depressing nocturnes in one sitting.

But there’s a profound sense of loss and sadness to the moment in which we find ourselves living as I write this that lent these nocturnes and Hicks’s playing of them a transfixing resonance for me that touched something in my being I wasn’t expecting and am unable to express. The music is filled with poetry and pathos, with love lost and longing, and always with indescribable beauty, but the title “nocturne” is apt, for once again, in a seemingly never-ending cycle, night has fallen on civilization. Will a new day dawn once again, as it always has in the past, or is this the end times? Perhaps the Oracle at Delphi knows the answer. Or maybe Tom Hicks does. If we listen to him play Chopin’s Nocturnes throughout the night, like an all-night vigil, he will usher in for us the next rising of the sun.

This is my attempt at trying, as best I can, to contextualize for you the extraordinary effect and emotional impact Hicks’s music-making had on me. Was it just the moment that caught me in a most receptive state to music I’m generally not receptive to? I don’t think so. There’s something about Hicks’s touch, the tone he draws from his piano—he’s a Yamaha Artist, so I assume it’s a Yamaha concert grand he’s playing—the sensitivity of his phrasing, and the subtleties of his voice-leading, as he takes us inside of Chopin’s emporium of harmonic wonders.

The ghost of Schubert made an appearance more than once, but I especially felt its presence in the mid-section of the Nocturne in CT Minor, op. 27/1, which has much in common with the angry mid-section of the Andantino movement from Schubert’s Piano Sonata, D 959. The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s program annotator described that passage in the Schubert as being “so uncoupled from what came before, a deranged breakdown of sorts, played out as we listen, unforgiving and tragic.” That is exactly how would describe the mid-section of Chopin’s op. 27/1. Where does such tortured music come from? And in a nocturne. This is indeed the music of night terrors.

Nor is this nocturne unique in that respect among the 21. Many have more animated mid-sections, some of which veer into very agitated passages. And some don’t seem to really fit the lullaby-like, sweet-dreams-like character of the music we tend to associate with the nocturne title—for example, the Nocturne in AI Major, op. 32/2, which has an almost folksy, dance-like character. But these broadenings of the genre to allow a wider palette of musical elements into the mix are evidence of Chopin taking what he learned from Field and endowing it with his special spark of genius.

This is a Chopin disc for all to covet and have.