It was a night of music and magic. In the beautiful pastoral setting of the Abbey Mill Wheel, just outside Ballyshannon, the Coffee Shop hosted an exhibition of paintings by Seoirse Ó Dochartaigh called “Nocturne”. The theme of the show was music, but music of the night in particular.
The inspiration for these Nocturne paintings came from John Field, an Irish composer born in Dublin in 1782. Field made his home in Russia and gained a huge reputation for himself there both as a pianist and composer. His music has been somewhat neglected over the last 100 years or so but today most of his compositions are available on CD performed by internationally acclaimed pianists like John O’Conor. Field’s name has at last been reinstated as one of the great pianists of all time and as the man who invented the piano “Nocturne”.
I know these piano nocturnes of John Field intimately, and even did a series of paintings in the year 2000 based on the complete set. I referred to the paintings then as “little pictures of the night”, but Field didn’t compose his nocturnes with any programme in mind. If he did, he never told anyone. He was born in Golden Lane in Dublin.
