Although one is told that this generous helping of Field's music is played on a Steinway piano, the tone of the instrument sounds to me more like an old American Steinway than a modern Hamburg one. The sonority in the treble is rather veiled in quality and this suits the limpid grace of the music extremely well. Personally, I would have appreciated a slightly less closely recorded tone, but this is a quibble.
As for Cuckston's performances, he maintains a certain classical reserve throughout and those passages usually portrayed as climaxes of tension tend to sound rather short on animation. Nevertheless, Field himself was notoriously prone to laziness, and so maybe Cuckston's approach re- flects the composer's own lackadaisical attitude to life in general; though, having said this, the dynamic markings found in the score tell another story. This is a CD that can be firmly recommended to someone who wants to hear a fair sample of Field's music—it should be noted that one or two Nocturnes are missing, most notably No. 14 in C major, which is amongst the best and most significant.'