Born in Chile, Claudio Arrau (1903-1991) was one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, an artist who was totally serious about his role in life, a man completely dedicated to the music of the great composers who shared his insights and understanding of their work with his public. Where other famous pianists play the piano for excitement, power or display, Arrau plays to probe, to divine, to interpret. Says Arrau, 'An interpreter must give his blood to the work interpreted.' Arrau is definitely not onesided or without spiritual grandeur. Having won particular fame as a great Beethoven interpreter, he is no less celebrated for his Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms and Debussy. Among the famed peers of his generation, it is a range without equal. Located on the campus of Ambassador College in Pasadena, California, the 1262 seat Ambassador Auditorium was a major West Coast concert hall between 1974 and 1995 presenting around 2500 concerts, and attracted the greatest instrumentalists and orchestras. role in the musical life of our ensemble. It's musical complexity and the depth of expression which Mozart achieves through only three voices are seemingly miraculous: it is one of those pieces which constantly rewards rehearsal. One simply never gets tired of playing it! When the opportunity to record this masterpiece arose, we were faced with the challenge of what to play alongside it. Our dear friend Rob Fokkens had written two short movements for string trio which seemed to fit beautifully with Mozart's music: Rob's translucent harmonic and rhythmic style offers unique expressive possibilities. The chance to commission the great Julian Joseph was not to be missed, and his work, Bring it!, wonderfully demonstrates his brilliance and lyricism, and the subtly of his harmonic language. We sincerely hope you enjoy listening to the music on this album as much as we loved preparing it! to Islamic Iberia or the Al-Andalusian era of Spain between the 8th-15th centuries. Yet the fi rst men? on of Flamenco by name is not un? l 1774, where it appears in an epistolary novel, Cartas Marruecas, by the playwright and soldier, Jose de Cadalso y Vazquez. In collabora? on with soparno Victoria Couper, kanun player, Konstan? nos Glynos, and oud/Flamenco guitarist, Ignacio Lusardi Monteverde, this album seeks to explore this ques? on by tracing the infl uences on Flamenco through Arabic music alongside Sephardic song and the Spanish composers of the late-16th to 18th centuries. What happened in these intervening centuries?

The third and final volume in an enlightening series of Liszt's music for two pianos: new recordings masterminded by the great Lisztian of our time, Leslie Howard, and featuring several world-premiere recordings. Leslie Howard's complete survey of the piano music of Liszt has been widely acknowledged as a monument in the history of sound recording. Since that vast project reached completion, however, he has continued to mine the Lisztian archives for buried treasure. In partnership with Mattia Ometto, he has recorded the complete symphonic poems and the Faust and Dante symphonies, in versions for two pianos made by Liszt himself. Issued by Brilliant Classics, these collections have met with enthusiasm from dedicated Lisztians, who will be even more eager to acquire the final volume of the series. This features several works better known in their solo-piano versions, such as the Reminiscences de Don Juan de Mozart and the Fantasia and Fugue on B-A-C-H. The Concerto pathetique may be slightly more familiar in this, it's original version for two pianos, but the Groes Konzertstück based on three of Mendelssohn's Songs without Words is a genuine rarity. There are two versions of the multi-authored Hexameron based on a theme from Bellini's I Puritani, the second of which has never been recorded, along with a transcription of the Festklange tone-poem which again differs in detail from the one recorded by Howard and Ometto in their earlier survey. The finer points of the editions are engagingly discussed by Howard in his booklet note. The performances themselves lack nothing for drama as well as authenticity, and open a window on to the generosity of Liszt's artistic relationship with earlier masters and notable contemporaries. If we view Liszt these days as a pivotal figure in 19th-century music, it is not least thanks to Howard's dauntless dedication to the cause.

A central figure of the organ in the first half of the twentieth century, Marcel Dupre (1886-1971) brought the French symphonic organ to international prominence and trained several generations of leading organists. In this recording, Olivier Latry pays tribute to this composer and arranger through works that place particular emphasis on the dialogue between the symphonic organ and the orchestra in it's fullest expression.

Following her first recording of concertos for Channel Classics (CCS47825), the Franco-Hungarian pianist Suzana Bartal pays tribute to her Hungarian roots with a programme that showcases a variety of styles, from Liszt and his Gypsy influences to Bartok, who, through his campaigns to collect folk songs, immersed himself in folk and peasant music. Erno Dohnanyi's Ruralia Hungarica, composed in 1923, is more post-Romantic in style, although the composer himself also occasionally turned to folk music.

Introducing Jiaxin Min in her debut album, this recording marks the arrival of a compelling new voice on the international piano scene. Emerging as an audience favourite from the Queen Elisabeth Competition she combines expressive intensity, clarity of thought and a deeply personal artistic vision. Centred around the idea of farewell and reunion, the programme brings together Beethoven's intimate Sonata Lebewohl ('Les Adieux'), Liszt's dramatic Ballade No. 2, and Barber's powerful Piano Sonata. Through these landmark works, Jiaxin Min explores themes of absence, transformation and rediscovery, drawing on her own personal journey through music and returns to the stage. Balancing virtuosity with introspection and emotional depth, this first album reveals an artist of rare maturity and personality.

Kotaro Fukuma presents a magnificent collection of piano transcriptions combining virtuosity and lyricism. In addition to popular plays such as Bach-Gounod's Ave Maria, Schumann-Liszt's Widmung and Wagner-Liszt's Liebestod Isolde, the program includes Fukuma's own transcript of Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik and a potpourri of French songs, "Chanson Medley". by his admirers.

The church music Franz Liszt composed in his later years was always innovative, radical, and thoroughly idiosyncratic, yet was frequently and unjustly overlooked in the repertoire. Now, the Bavarian Radio Chorus, conducted by Peter Dijkstra, has taken on the cycle VIA CRUCIS. It was never performed during Liszt's lifetime; the composer worked on it in the autumn of 1878 as a guest of Cardinal zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst at the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, not far from Rome. The new CD from BR-KLASSIK presents a live recording of an extraordinary concert from April 2025 at Munich's Prinzregententheater. Via Crucis, the Way of the Cross, usually comprising fourteen stations of the Passion of Christ-from conviction to death to deposition to burial-has over the centuries been the subject of prayer at the traditional sites in Jerusalem, on pilgrimages, in Catholic churches worldwide, at roadside shrines, in outdoor chapels, and on Calvaries. In composing his version, Franz Liszt mainly had the Good Friday procession in the Roman Colosseum in mind, 'in that place whose ground is steeped in the blood of the martyrs.' He wrote his 14 Stations of the Cross for solo voices, choir, and organ (originally piano), yet was much taken with the idea of carrying a harmonium into the ruins of the Colosseum for his musical devotions to be sung there too: 'I would be happy if those sounds could be heard there that only faintly reflect the inner emotion that overcame me when, on my knees with the devout procession, I more than once repeated the Latin words.' It remained a mere vision, however: his late work VIA CRUCIS was neither rehearsed nor published, and met with firm rejection from the purists of the ultra-conservative Cecilian movement. It was not until fifty years later, on Good Friday 1929, that the work was finally premiered in Budapest.

Timothy Fallon and Ammiel Bushakevitz appear regularly together in recital, and in 2013 won first prize in the Wigmore Hall/Kohn Foundation International Song Competition. For their début album as a duo they have devised an all-Liszt programme which spans some 40 years of the composer's career, taking in settings of poems in four different languages. Most of Liszt's 70 or so songs were composed during the 1840s, but Liszt returned to many of them over the course of his life, sometimes revising them more than once and in some cases arranging them for solo piano. Certain of these arrangements, such as the three settings of sonnets by Petrarch which open the present release, have become better known than the originals. Another Italian setting is the tenderly lyrical Angiolin da biondo crin, written for Liszt's daughter Blandine. Composed in 1839 it is the composer's first song, but Fallon and Bushakevitz have chosen to perform the revised version made some 10 years later. Although French was not Liszt’s mother tongue, it became his preferred language and he composed a number of songs to French texts – many of them by Victor Hugo, his friend and idol. Another author admired by Liszt was Schiller, whose Wilhelm Tell inspired revolutionaries during the tumultuous 1840s. Among some of the later songs are Jugendglück, a rhapsodic tour-de-force exemplary of Liszt’s virtuosic style, and Go not, happy day from 1879, the only English setting among his songs. The programme closes with another late song, Ihr Glocken von Marling, to a poem by Emil Kuh which inspired Liszt to create an intensely evocative soundscape.

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REVIEW:

American tenor Timothy Fallon's voice is exceptional, darkish in tone, evenly produced, capable of both ringing high notes and a superbly controlled mezza voce. His way with words is thoughtful, considerate: the catalog of emotions that opens Pace non trovo is carefully if intelligently negotiated; later on, the Hugo settings Comment disaient-ils and Enfant, si j'étais roi gleam with understated wit and and sensuality. No serious Lisztian will want to be without this disc.

– Gramophone

BIS takes over from Avie presenting Andreas Haefliger’s ongoing (albeit slowly unfolding) Perspectives releases, a series that encompasses intelligent and often unexpected juxtapositions of mixed repertoire. As with its predecessors, Volume 7 features one Beethoven sonata. Haefliger’s careful phrasing and attention to voice leading makes a case for his muted and reflective way with Op. 101’s first movement, although he undermines the music’s undercurrents of energy and subito dynamics. At first the gnarly march movement seems dynamically constricted, yet the obsessive dotted rhythms gather momentum through Haefliger’s spot-on balances, pointed articulation of trills, and attention to transitional passages; it’s closer to Wilhelm Kempff’s caustic perception than, say, the nervous tension of Ernst Levy or the best of Vladimir Horowitz’s myriad live versions. And the difficult fourth-movement Fugue’s contrapuntal strands take on a woodwind-like character under Haefliger’s agile fingers.

The pianist has obviously lived with and “lived in” Berg’s Sonata for some time. At least that’s the impression he conveys in the exposition, where the primary lines and imitative rejoinders intertwine in relaxed conversation. The thick-textured development section sacrifices headlong urgency for top-to-bottom clarity. Similarly, Haefliger shapes the ebb of lyrical phrases and fluttering birdsong caressingly yet never indulgently in Liszt’s St. Francis Légende No. 1.

Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition abounds with interesting and illuminating interpretive ideas. For example, Haefliger’s rhetorical underlinings in Gnomus reinforce the music’s menacing yet mysterious character. The third Promenade is not loudly declaimed, but deliberate and reticent. Ritards at phrase endings impart an aptly hesitant quality to the Tuileries’ middle section, and there’s a welcome dramatic specificity in the gradual diminuendo at the end of Bydlo. The Unhatched Chicks ballet is lightning-quick and almost deadpan in the way that Haefliger maintains the tempo throughout the central section: most pianists slightly broaden the tempo.

On the other hand, the pianist softens the intended sting of Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle’s repeated-note sequence. But he resists the temptation to speed through the Limoges marketplace, taking a tempo that allows for the climactic broken chords to clearly register and resonate. However, I miss the final two movements’ potential for dynamism and orchestral impact that thrill me in the recordings by Ashkenazy, Berman, Bronfman, and, of course, the sonically grungy yet interpretively amazing live 1958 Sofia performance by Sviatoslav Richter.

In the end, Haefliger’s mastery, intelligence, and stylistic breadth deserve admiration and respect. I also should mention the concert hall realism of BIS’ engineering , together with this SACD’s unusually generous 86-plus minutes of playing time.

– ClassicsToday (Jed Distler)

Following their critically acclaimed recording of the Faust Symphony (BIS-2510), the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège, conducted by Gergely Madaras and joined by the Choeur Symphonique de Namur, now presents Liszt's Dante Symphony-a work reflecting his profound engagement with Dante's Divine Comedy. Initially planned in three movements-Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso-the Dante Symphony was ultimately cast as two symphonic poems with a choral conclusion. The Inferno opens with a stern trombone theme beneath Dante's gate inscription, moves through lyrical episodes evoking Paolo and Francesca, and ends in demonic frenzy. The Purgatorio, serene and simple, contains a central fugue evoking souls striving toward paradise, leading without pause into the choral Magnificat. Liszt's treatment of tonality anticipates Mahler and Nielsen, while his use of the tritone and whole-tone scale confirms him as a composer ahead of his time. This recording also includes the symphony's original conclusion, later abandoned at Richard Wagner's insistence. The programme concludes with John Adams' orchestration of La Lugubre Gondola II, a visionary late work inspired by a funeral gondola procession on Venice's Grand Canal. Adams' arrangement honours the structural, stylistic, and poetic dimensions of Liszt's original, placing it's Romantic language within a modern soundscape.

Following Wanderer Without Words (Alpha 984), which demonstrated her talents as a transcriber and pianist - 'we applaud both the skill of the composition and the performance, which alternates between subtle gestures and flashes of passion', wrote Diapason - Juliette Journaux now embarks on 'a declaration of love for German post-Romanticism', born at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, which dares to marry "the sublime and the trivial, beauty and ugliness, ecstasy and anguish, the divine and the carnal." Composers are gradually breaking free from classical structures, the boundaries of tonality are being pushed back, and the system of organising sounds around a stable central pole of attraction is being overturned: "Post-Romanticism muddies the clear waters," continues the French pianist. These tensions are embodied in a particularly striking manner in a work whose shockwaves reverberated throughout the late 19th century: Tristan und Isolde, premiered on 10 June 1865. The 'Wagner case' would captivate the musical world for decades, and young Viennese composers would follow in the master's footsteps: Wolf, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Schreker, Braunfels and Korngold feature on the programme of this recital, comprising numerous transcriptions by the pianist, which sheds a captivating light on this historic turning point.

A generation before the now iconic Dinu Lipatti died of cancer at the age of 33, a much less remembered Polish pianist, Karol Szreter (1898-1933), died of the same disease at almost the same age. A pupil of Egon Petri, so of the Busoni school, his brief career began in central Europe and by the time of his death he was becoming acknowledged as a major figure in the pianistic world. His first recordings were made acoustically for VOX, where he recorded both as accompanist and soloist, and we have included one example. He was then taken up by the sister labels Parlophon and Odeon and the majority of these recordings are presented here. Of note is the first electrical recording of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 4 and three further sonatas, and - reflecting a different side of his art - five brilliant Strauss transcriptions where he reveals his stupendous technique.

Born in Verona in 1998, Giovanni Bertolazzi won the silver medal at the 2021 Liszt Piano Competition in Budapest, previous editions of which launched the careers of piano legends such as Annie Fischer and Dino Ciani. He has already made an enthusiastically received Liszt albums, and has established his credentials as a Liszt interpreter of rare insight and prodigious technique. On this album, his Piano Classics debut, Bertolazzi presents some of the most technically demanding and yet expressively wide-ranging works in the composer's vast output. Every serious Lisztian has measured up to the Paganini Etudes in the past, and Bertolazzi now joins their number. Within the course of the intricately interlinked six etudes of the Paganini cycle, we move from the Bachian, arpeggiated flourishes of the opening Tremolo, to the witty and allusive gestures of 'Octaves', and then the notoriously hair-raising leaps of 'La Campanella'. In these works, sublime virtuosity is always placed at the service of imagination, visual and literary almost as much as strictly musical. By the time Liszt had come to revise his earlier, even more testing version of the Paganini Etudes, finalising them in 1851 in the form familiar to us today, he had produced several more 'Concert Etudes', and the profound melancholy which afflicted his later years had begun to show through in a piece such as 'Un sospiro'. Liszt virtually invented the tone-poem or tone-painting as a musical genre, whether on the canvases of piano or orchestra. In Waldesrauschen we hear the activity of the forest - the fluttering of foliage, chirping of birds and so on - but even more we are transported into the mind of one who feels the crunch of every branch underfoot, fulfilling Beethoven's claim for his Pastoral Symphony that it was 'more the expression of feeling than tone-painting'. In the lesser-known 'Grande etude de perfectionnement', titled 'Ab irato', we sense the depths of Liszt's religious feeling, and the full measure of a profoundly Romantic sense of the scale between man and God, between heaven and hell, all within less than three minutes. The dryly entitled 'Concert Etudes' of Liszt thus plunge the listener into remarkably contrasting inner worlds.

To speak of Franz Liszt is to enter a world in which categories collapse. Virtuoso, visionary, reformer, celebrity, mystic - none of these labels is sufficient, and yet each illuminates a facet of a musician whose creative presence reshaped 19th-century musical life. He inhabited his age with a rare duality: outwardly the most electrifying pianist Europe had ever known, inwardly a thinker preoccupied with the ethical, spiritual and imaginative potential of art. That tension - between public spectacle and private enquiry - lies at the heart of an oeuvre whose range and unpredictability remain without parallel. Liszt's early fame rested on a pianistic style that expanded the technical and expressive boundaries of the instrument. His performances were not merely demonstrations of dexterity but events that altered the nature of concert listening itself, whether in orchestral appearances or in the solo recital format he effectively established. However, virtuosity was never an end in itself. From the 1830s onward, Liszt's compositions increasingly acknowledged poetic, literary and philosophical impulses, often signaled through titles, epigraphs or extra-musical associations. This stimulus would later crystallise in his codification of the symphonic poem, but it was equally present in his keyboard music, where narrative, argument and symbolism frequently replace abstract formal logic. A central expression of this aesthetic is Liszt's lifelong engagement with the march - a genre that might seem, on the surface, to withstand the kind of reflective complexity he prized. The march offered something irresistible: a form already laden with public meaning, ripe for reinterpretation. In his hands, it's regulated tread becomes a medium for ambiguity, it's grand gestures inflected with harmonic adventurousness, it's civic pronouncements quietly complicated by covert sensibility. The same impulse that drove him to revisit and rework earlier compositions in the light of new understanding shaped his relationship to the genre as a whole: returning to it across decades, he treated it not as a fixed form but as an evolving channel for dramatic, national and personal expression.

The internationally renowned pianist Yulianna Avdeeva presents Metanoia, a profound exploration of the late piano works of Franz Liszt, tracing his radical transformation from virtuoso to visionary. Liszt's late works mark a decisive break with traditional musical language and form, opening the door to 20th-century modernism through bold harmonic experimentation, compressed structures, and strikingly dissonant sonorities. Stripped of conventional melodic development, these brief but intense works convey deep existential reflection, touching on themes of faith, mortality, and the human condition. Initially met with resistance, they would later become a major influence on composers such as Bartok, Scriabin, Debussy, and Ravel. The album unfolds in reverse chronology, culminating in Liszt's Sonata in B Minor and Legende No. 2. The Sonata in B Minor stands as one of the most important works in the piano repertoire: a single-movement structure of extraordinary dramatic and philosophical scope, where contrasting themes emerge, collide, and transform into a journey from darkness to transcendence. For Avdeeva, Liszt's music is never purely virtuosic, but an existential inquiry into the deepest aspects of human experience - light and darkness, faith and doubt, life and death - revealing a composer who continually expanded the possibilities of musical thought and expression. Yulianna Avdeeva returns to PENTATONE after a string of critically acclaimed releases: her label debut Resilience (2023), followed by Chopin: Voyage (2024) and Shostakovich: 24 Preludes and Fugues Op. 87 (2025). Together, these recordings have garnered international awards and widespread acclaim across the globe.

Antonio Stradivari's 1700 'ex Cristiani-Stauffer' cello, considered to be one of the master's finest works, was purchased by the Walter Stauffer Musicology Center in Cremona. It is now on display at the Violin Museum in Cremona. The history of this cello, though at times uncertain, suddenly becomes clear when it comes to Lisa Cristiani, a Parisian cellist who acquired the instrument, definitively linking her name to Stradivari and the cello. Lisa died very young in 1853 at just 26 years old, a fleeting star on the musical scene of her time: in just a few years, she enchanted audiences with her extraordinary cello. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy dedicated his Song Without Words, Op. 109, to her. But today, you can hear 'The Voice of Stradivari,' the voice of this precious cello, on this CD released by the Italian label MVcremona. The excellent performers are the cellist Giovanni Gnocchi, born in Cremona like Stradivari's cello, and the pianist Alessandro Stella. According to the renowned Italian critic Angelo Foletto, on this CD, 'Gnocchi exploits with loving interpretative skill and virtuosic ease every quality of the 18th-century 'Stauffer ex Cristiani' Stradivari cello, constructing a listening adventure of intriguing poetic subtlety and an intelligent assortment of accents.' SUONARE news, dicembre 2025 This cd includes some pieces written by cellist-composers themselves (Popper and Klengel). Other pieces were transcribed by famous concert performers and cello virtuosos of modern and contemporary times (Piatigorsky, Schiff, Isserlis). Others were dedicated by composers to their cellist friends, as in the case of Dvorak and Hanus Wihan, Liszt and Bernhard Cossmann, the living composer Ducros and Jerome Pernoo and Mendelssohn, who dedicated his Romances sans paroles op. 109 to Lisa Cristiani, then owner of this beautiful Stradivari. The final piece is an Italian masterpiece composed by Gioacchino Rossini: 'Une larme, theme et variations'. The combination of elegiac cantabile and explosive virtuosity encapsulates the characteristics that have inspired the musical choices in this CD. Rediscovered only in recent decades, it belongs to the Peches de vieillesse, the 'sins of old age' as Rossini called the many compositions he wrote in his later years and never published because, as he said, 'I do not publish anything; I only write because I cannot do anything else'. Composed in 1858, it offers the musician all the most typical elements of Rossini's genial style.