Advice sought on Chopin Nocturne Op 9 No 3

[stoat_king]

Hello there.
I am hoping someone will be kind enough to give me some advice.
Whilst I have a specific example, this is something that is relatively commonplace in works by Chopin.
Chopin Nocturne Op 9 No 3, has a time signature of 6/8.
Typically the left hand contains six quavers (8th notes) in this piece.
Bar 79 has the usual 6 quavers in the left hand and a run of 24 demisemiquavers (32nd notes).
Nothing unusual so far.

However, my issue is with bar 25, which again has six quavers in the left hand, but this time it has the equivalent of 29 demisemiquavers in the right hand. Ouch!
My question is: what is the best thing to do about this?

What I tend to do is artificially line up the left hand notes with those notes in the right hand that I consider most appropriate, and speed up or slow down the right hand part to fit.

However, I'm pretty sure this isn't ideal.
Not only do I feel that the sheet music is staring at me accusingly, I have even had a dream where Chopin pushed me down the stairs.

Any advice would be most welcome.

[j_menz]

I have even had a dream where Chopin pushed me down the stairs.

You're safe, There's quite a queue and he's something of a weakling.

Do you know anything about polyrhythms?

[stoat_king]

Only by experience - I know nothing of the theory.
Most of the time I don't have any difficulty.
For instance, in this same piece, there are instances of 3 notes in the left hand to variously 4, 5 and 7 in the right. No problem.
Then again, these don't last a whole bar and are very much simpler.

A ratio of 6 notes in left to 29 in right is daunting though.

I had a similar problem with bar 3 of Nocturne Op 3 No 1 - that has 12 notes in the left hand to 22 in the right hand. Long practice has smudged that problem out of existence - even so, I'm not sure that I know what I'm doing or how I'm doing it. My fingers and ears seem to have worked it out between themselves without any intervention from my brain.

I have no doubt that I'll get it eventually - I just don't know how to attack such a problem other by the kind of cheating / compromise I mention in the opening post.

Should I even be aiming to precisely reproduce the sheet music?
It may be that playing precisely 4 and 5/6ths notes in the right hand for every one in the left sounds awful...

[j_menz]

Should I even be aiming to precisely reproduce the sheet music?
It may be that playing precisely 4 and 5/6ths notes in the right hand for every one in the left sounds awful...

The LH should be accurate and in time. The RH flourish should be free, though the notes shouldn't deliberately line up. Chopin uses these strange numbers to avoid any oh the RH notes falling on a beat, so don't try and "correct" him. The RH should be pretty free form, unaccented, starting on the first beat but otherwise just doing what sounds best without sweating the maths.

[stoat_king]

Thats exactly the sort of advice I was after. Thank you very much.