By recording mainstream repertoire and placing it in the public domain you inevitably risk comparison. You could, of course, agree with the late Alex Kelly (one time head of keyboard studies at the Royal Academy of Music) that such comparison is invalid; that every pianist has a unique and therefore valid identity. Yet I feel compelled to say that Tom Hicks is, to put it baldly, unequal to his task. The Chopin Nocturnes cry out for special qualities that demand a high degree of pianistic sophistication, a foundation for the drama and lyricism at their heart, and which is best captured by the poet Keats when he spoke of an 'embalmed darkness.'. Music of the night, as their title declares, the Nocturnes transcend rather than pay tribute to John Field, the originator of the genre, and they remain an immense challenge to a pianist's every pianistic and imaginative resource. And, despite Alex Kelly's controversial stricture, the catalogue is full of recordings by pianists who, in their infinite variety, are able to meet and indeed go far beyond Chopin's challenge. Ivan Moravec, Maria Pires, more recently Stephen Hough, and most of all Artur Rubinstein (in his early 1930's recording) are artists of the highest calibre able in their different ways to reach out, as it were, to the stars and offer performances that in Liszt's words show a 'very suaveness that grows heartbreaking, so thinly does it veil anguish.' A tall order indeed, but one which the pianist must strive to achieve.
Tom Hicks, who follows tradition, claiming that Chopin freely improvised his scores ensuring that no two performances were alike or set in stone, plays with obvious affection, yet time and again his technical foundation is so limited and unformed that it inhibits his attempt at musical and poetic empathy. More positively, his playing improves on the second of his two discs (was it recorded on a separate occasion?). There is a higher degree of involvement in the second chorale-like chant in the C minor Nocturne—greatest and most elegiac of the set-- and also in the octave fusillades that build towards the climax. He also captures something of the plaintiff pleading of the F sharp Nocturne. But sadly, these are exceptions. In, for example No 3 in B major his openness replaces the darker and interior aspects of Chopin's sophistication and where is the mystery in the extraordinary modernity of the opus 27 No 1 Nocturne in C sharp minor? You do not have to go as far as ever-fanciful James Huneker who saw in this Nocturne a 'corpse washed ashore on a moonlit Venetian lagoon' to capture it's far-seeing and powerfully disturbing nature. Elsewhere sublimity is reduced to every-day language and if sound is not everything, it counts for a great deal in music that cries out for a greater sense of lyricism, of variety of texture, harmony and rhythm. I found myself wishing that Hicks had listened to a great singer, notably to Callas, to learn more about Chopin's inimitable pianistic yet vocal achievement. If you did not 'sing' for him in your playing, he lost interest.
Bryce Morrison