LISZT: NEW DISCOVERIES 4

ETUDES D'EXECUTION TRANSCENDANTE

Volume 66 in the Liszt Complete Piano Music series focuses on transcriptions from operas by Mozart and Donizetti. The Reminiscences on Mozart's Don Giovanni, with it's technical demands and innovations, stands at the pinnacle of Liszt's transcription procedure.

Classical Music

Classical Music

The first Polish recording of the full cycle of Franz Liszt's Transcendental Etudes in their final version from 1851. Radoslaw Sobczak is a pianist equally endowed with virtuoso instinct and great musical sensitivity; his recitals have graced prestigious events on four continents; winner of an honourable mention in the International Chopin Piano Competition. On the album, he faces one of the most demanding piano pieces, the difficulty of which lies not only in the technical layer, but also, and perhaps especially, in the musical one. Behind the extremely dense texture and the cascades of chords and passages, there is the composer's musical idea, and sometimes even programmatic contents - as in the famous Mazeppa etude. Out of the rush of sounds, lyrical motifs emerge, while complex harmonies reflect an entire range of emotions that need to be conveyed to the listeners. The artist copes with this challenge excellently; his pianism perfectly harmonizes with the spirit of Liszt's virtuosity. Metaphysics and contemplation collide in his interpretations with the saturated, deep sound of the piano.

The University of York is very fortunate to own this exquisite 1856 Erard London concert grand piano, lovingly restored by Nigel Scaife and tuned to the Bach-Lehman temperament by Aidan Delacey-Simms. The piano is straight strung allowing greater separation of registers compared to it's more homogenised modern counterpart. The strings are damped from below, rather than above as in a modern piano, a less efficient design that results in pleasing result is a wash of colour and a ring of complex overtones that was surely an aesthetic choice. Pianos were likely not tuned in equal temperament in the mid-19th century and my choice of unequal temperament brings extra resonance to the instrument as well as colour to the music. Daniel Grimwood is best known as a world-leading exponent of 19th century virtuosic piano repertoire. Received with critical acclaim, Grimwood's recordings and performances of the music of Adolph von Henselt ensure his international reputation as a groundbreaking, inspirational musician, making him out as a unique voice amongst his generation of pianists. His recording of Henselt's Complete Etudes garnered "instant classic status" by Gramophone Magazine, which also named it piano release of 2023.

LISZT: SONATA, ZWEITE ELEGIE

Gerhard Oppitz is a deeply serious artist who also possesses a virtuoso technique, and in this he resembles Peter Donohoe, having also been born in the same year, 1953. I have liked him in Brahms, and this Liszt recital may also win him admirers—I see that he also recorded the two piano concertos and Hungarian Fantasia with Roberto Abbado and the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra (reviewed in June). Here, he makes a choice of solo piano music that usefully mixes bigger and smaller pieces. The Variations, with which he begins, are the longest work, and show us the composer in intense baroque mood as he develops his ideas upon a ground bass from Bach's cantata of that name. The pianist takes an equally broad view and allows the music to unfold with appropriate grandeur: indeed, this is a big performance in every sense...

-- Christopher Headington, Gramophone [9/1992]

*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

Selections recorded at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Pentrith, Australia.

"Excellent renderings of familiar Liszt works by Gary Graffman, whose touch and style grow more impressive with each release." -- Billboard

"There is some magnificent piano-playing on this record." -- Gramophone

Between Lise de la Salle and Franz Liszt, is an affinity, one could say a love story, that has lasted for more than twenty years. For her second album, recorded in 2005 when she was only seventeen, she had him paired with Bach (V5006). Six years later (V5267, 2011), she recorded her first all-Liszt album, a rather dark disc, where the tragic and relentless Funerailles and Apres une lecture du Dante rubbed shoulders with the heartbreaking nudity of Nuages gris and Lacrymosa. Unrolling this Ariadne's thread once again, the French pianist now defends two of the greatest masterpieces, surprisingly complementary, of the most cosmopolitan composer of European Romanticism. A summing up of Lisztian art, the Sonata in B minor, reserved for pianists with wrists of steel and hearts of gold, shines with a particular glow in the piano repertoire of the 19th century. Sensitive to the myriad nuances of this splendid fresco structured as an uninterrupted movement, Lise de la Salle balances here with astonishing ease the dramatic impact of Goethe's Faust and the contemplative lyricism present in the tonal landscapes of the Annees de pelerinage. The assiduous frequentation of the Lisztian universe will have facilitated the in-depth analysis of the Sonata, which quickly became for the pianist an integral part of her artistic persona?and yet, what a maelstrom of sounds! The final part of the Harmonies poetiques et religieuses, the Cantique d'amour, played here as an escape towards the light, introduces the Reminiscences de Don Juan, a fantasy in the form of variations which, through it's overwhelming emotional power, works as an answer to the Sonata. A great admirer of Mozart's Don Giovanni, Lise de la Salle restores the nobility of this now rarely performed work. Liszt takes up famous motifs from Mozart's opera, in an aesthetic full of passion, in which he magnifies his striking art of contrasts and his dazzling virtuoso writing. By placing these Reminiscences as a mirror of the Sonata, Lise de la Salle gets as close as possible to Lisztian genius at the same time as she refines her art of dark atmospheres.

Volume 65 in the Liszt Complete Piano Music series features works based on Hungarian themes, including the famous Rakoczi March, heard here in two contrasting versions. Pianist Christopher Williams has previously recorded Brahms and Mendelssohn for Naxos, as well as a series of Barmotin's piano music for Grand Piano.

Not that every item here can be said to be fully familiar, even to the regular concert-goer, but taken as a whole this programme affords a conspectus of Liszt in various guises: the master of original large-scale form alongside smaller, transcribed gems; the arch-Romantic who understood the music of his great predecessors better than any of his contemporaries, one whose own original music - for all it's powerful empfindsamkeit - was initially firmly rooted in the precepts of the classical masters.