Liszt Complete Piano Music, Vol. 14: Bunte Reihe

Volume 6 of Naxos' Complete Piano Music of Liszt continues the exploration of Liszt's transcriptions of lieder begun in the previous Volume 5. Compared to the commercial greats of pianism, Joseph Banowetz is not well known, and yet he one of the most versatile pianists alive. His repertory is variegated and often incongruent: he has left many recordings of Bach, Anton Rubinstein, Balakirev and Ronald Stevenson. I am an ardent supporter of Banowetz because of his amazing recordings of Anton's Rubinstein's works on the Marco Polo label.

LISZT: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 / Totentanz

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On the present disc it is the all-Brazilian team of eminent pianist Arnaldo Cohen and the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Neschling who join forces. Arnaldo Cohen is a highly respected Liszt interpreter, as he has shown on a previous BIS release (CD1253), which earned him an Editor's Choice in Gramophone as well as glowing reviews, such as the following in the Chicago Tribune: 'These performances pack a tremendous visceral punch...among the most musically intelligent recordings of these celebrated pieces to grace the catalogue.' The São Paulo SO and Neschling have recently been earning international recognition both after highly successful tours and a number of BIS recordings that among other things have been desribed as 'the most vibrant, colourful, rhythmically vital and virtuosic performances imaginable' (Classics Today.com)

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

As a teenager, Franz Liszt created at least two virtuosic concertos for piano and orchestra, scores which now are lost. The three works gathered here first saw the light of day only a few years later, however, during the 1830's when Liszt’s career as a young, travelling virtuoso was at its height. The two numbered concertos, which Liszt revised extensively before letting them be published some 25 years after their conception, frame the single-movement Malédiction for piano and strings which Liszt composed in 1833 and revised in 1840, but which was never published in his lifetime. Stepping into Liszt's shoes for the present recording is Alexandre Kantorow, another very young man. Born in 1997, Alexandre is here supported by his father Jean-Jacques Kantorow conducting the Tapiola Sinfonietta, a team with a number of highly acclaimed recordings to their credit. The recording is Alexandre’s first for BIS, as well as being his début concerto disc, and represents a remarkable achievement by a hugely promising talent, as well as being a vibrant and exciting account of three impassioned scores.

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Having visited in recent times many new countries, many diverse sites, many places hallowed by history and poetry, having felt that the various aspects of nature and of related scenes did not pass before my eyes as vain images.

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At first glance, the two composers represented on this disc may seem an unlikely couple: Franz Liszt the archetypal virtuoso-composer who crisscrossed 19th century Europe mesmerizing his audiences, and Olivier Messiaen who at the age of 22 was appointed organist at the Sainte-Trinité Church in Paris, remaining there for the rest of his life. In this imaginatively constructed programme, the Swedish pianist (and neuroscientist) Fredrik Ullén juxtaposes music by the two, showing that there are closer parallels between them than might be expected. For a start, a significant role in both composers' work was played by religious convic­tions, and three of the Liszt pieces included here are related to saints of the Catholic Church: the composer's own patron saint St Francis of Paola, St Dorothea and St Francis of Assisi, whose sermon to the birds is the subject of the first of the Two Legends. But both men also ventured into unexplored musical territory, with Messiaen exploring bird song (which he chose to regard as an expression of 'religious joy') and Hindu rhythms, for instance in Cantéyodjayâ. Meanwhile Liszt in his later years would develop an austere musical style full of dissonance, whole-tone scales, diminished and augmented chords - as striking as it is advanced, and looking ahead far into the twentieth cen­tury. One of the prime examples of this late style is Unstern! Sinistre, disastro. On several discs for BIS, Fredrik Ullén has demonstrated not only a stupendous virtuosity, but also a striking originality in his choice of repertoire, including Ligeti's Études and George Flynn's unique, almost two-hour long triptych Trinity, described as 'an utterly convincing performance of this incredible work' on the website MusicWeb International.