Nocturne No. 1 in B-Flat Minor, Op. 9, No. 1

Content warning:
This post and song contain references to the Canadian Residential Schools system
and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirited.

Welcome to the first Classical Sunday of the year on Song of the Day for Today! I’m glad you’re here.

Today, I am featuring a nocturne for piano by the Polish composer Frederic Chopin (1810-1849). He wrote the Nocturnes, Op. 9, in 1831-1832; it was the first set of nocturnes that he published.

In an episode of Three Pines (2022), a TV series my sweety and I watched this past week, a troubled character is portrayed at the piano playing Nocturne No. 1 during a transition scene. The series is on Amazon Prime (in Canada) and is based on the Louise Penny novels about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, the fictional commander of the homicide squad in the Surete du Quebec in Canada. I’ll say a bit about the series, and no spoiler alerts here, folks… but if you haven’t seen it and don’t want to know anything about it, you’d better not read on.

The transition was from a particularly heavy scene where detectives connect their case with crimes committed when the site had been used by the Canadian government and the Catholic church’s Indian Residential Schools system. (This program stole about 150,000 Indigenous, Inuit and Metis children from their families in a deliberate act of cultural and human genocide from the 1870s to the late 1990s.) The series subplots include several emotionally-challenging scenes that highlight, in a humble and honouring way, victims’ and survivors’ experiences of abuse and neglect in the school system, along with the ongoing issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirited (MMIWG2S+).

We thoroughly enjoyed the series, and I’d highly recommend it. It is very well written, acted and produced, and features some great music. (I’ve read one of Penny’s series of books that feature Chief Inspector Gamache, Kingdom of the Blind. It was an excellent read, and I’d recommend it. (Sweety has also read others from the series and really liked them.)

The Shazam app tells me the music in the scene actually comes from a 1997 recording by Turkish concert pianist Idil Biret (b. 1941).

I’ve heard a lot of memorable music in films and TV over the years, and when something really caught my attention, I’d buy the soundtrack or the recording it came from, if I could identify it. (How did we get on in the years before the internet and Shazam?)

Now you know a little about why this is my Song of the Day for Today. Thanks for joining me here.

Here is the audio from the Idil Biret YouTube topic channel:

Do you try to find out who makes the music used in films you watch? Let me know this or any thoughts you have, in the comments; I’d love to hear from you.

With my best wishes,

Steve