Noctave
The piece
The two nocturnes of Op. 62 are the last ones Chopin published in his lifetime, in 1846. The first opens with a few rolled chords, then unfolds a smoothly bound melody in a texture where several voices interweave, a hallmark of late Chopin. After a more restless middle section marked sostenuto, the theme comes back transformed: it is almost entirely woven from trills, as if the melody were vibrating from start to finish.
The 34 trills are the central difficulty. They must stay even and soft, serving the melody, while the same hand sometimes holds another voice below: first learn the line without trills, then add them, starting with a fixed number of repercussions. Chords wider than an octave (up to 16 semitones) are played slightly rolled. The piece lasts more than six minutes and runs from a low F-sharp to a high F, so the real task is keeping a unified sound across that range and not letting the tension sag in the middle section. Five sharps in the key signature call for attentive reading.