Liszt's first meeting with Wagner in 1840 took place when the latter was struggling as a composer, and his transcriptions can be seen as part of a campaign to bring Wagner's work to the notice of a wider audience. These include many of Wagner's most famous dramatic moments, such as Isolde's Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde and the Wedding March from Lohengrin. The program concludes with the Solemn March to the Holy Grail from Wagner's last stage work Parsifal, Liszt's transcription of which was published in 1883, the year of Wagner's death.

This new recording presents a generous selection of transcriptions Franz Liszt made from Wagner orchestral works. + An ardent and devoted admirer of Wagner, Liszt supported him by performing his new operas in Weimar, and by making transcriptions to further popularize his music. + Liszt transfers the orchestral sonorities to the piano, creating new works of art. Francois Dumont is one of the foremost pianists of the young French generation. + As Laureate of the Warsaw Chopin competition he attracted international recognition. + His recordings have won a Diapason d’Or and other prizes.

After a highly successful recordings of works by Brahms, the Schumanns, and Chopin, Imogen Cooper plunges into the world of another great romantic, Franz Liszt, and places him alongside that other giant, Richard Wagner. This is an evocative programme of original compositions and intimate transcriptions, ranging from poetic movements from the Années de Pèlerinage: Italie to dark and deeply elegiac pieces, including Liszt's La lugubre gondola I and Wagner's Elegie. It also features a transcription by Zoltán Kocsis of the intensely passionate prelude to Tristan und Isolde. The famous pianist and conductor died prematurely in November, 2016. It was his work that inspired this recording to begin with, and Imogen Cooper dedicates the album to his memory. Breathtaking music in unique interpretations: romanticism without melodrama, virtuosity without fuss.

LISZT Wagner Transcriptions. WEBER-LISZT Oberon: Overture • Steven Mayer (pn) • NAXOS 8.570562 (67:32)


Tannhäuser: Overture ; O du mein holder Abendstern; Einzug der Gäste auf Wartburg. Die Meistersinger: Am stillen Herd. Der Ring des Nibelungen: Walhall


The year after Hyperion’s 1985 announcement of a project to record all Liszt’s piano music with Leslie Howard, Naxos unveiled its own complete Liszt piano music series. The Hyperion project, originally conceived as 48 CDs, was completed in 1999, and has recently been released as a 99-CD set, including supplemental volumes of late-breaking discoveries. Unlike the Hyperion set, the Naxos series has used a variety of pianists. During the past 24 years, 33 discs have appeared, among them some real gems. The Brazilian pianist Arnaldo Cohen inaugurated the series auspiciously with the solo Totentanz, the transcription of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre, the Grande fantaisie sur Les Huguenots, and other works (Naxos 553852). In 1996 Kemal Geki?’s performance of a number of Rossini transcriptions, including what is probably the best recording of the William Tell Overture, was released (Naxos 553961). Jean Dubé’s nuanced and subtle delivery of the two polonaises is also in the running for best-on-record of those difficult pieces; that disc also features the two ballades and the more than slightly outrageous Trois Morceaux Suisses , which Dubé tosses off with tremendous élan and sparkling technique (Naxos 557364). Giuseppe Andaloro’s diabolically bracing readings of the four Mephisto Waltzes share a disc with the two Élégies and an eloquent, spacious, and poetic Grosses Konzertsolo (Naxos 557814). The talented British pianists Leon McCawley and Ashley Wass recorded Liszt’s two-piano transcription of the Beethoven Ninth in 1997, which is a knock-out both musically and pianistically (Naxos 570466). Last year Wass recorded performances of the Impressions et Poésies book of Album d’un voyaguer and another of the more significant early works, Apparitions, displaying enormous pianistic finesse and imagination (Naxos 570768).


The 33rd and latest volume in the Naxos Liszt series presents the fascinating American pianist Steven Mayer in a program of Wagner and Weber transcriptions. Mayer’s bona fides as a Liszt player of distinction have long been established. His 1991 recording, called Liszt vs. Thalberg , was built around pieces played by the two contending virtuosi at the famous “musical duel,” part of a benefit concert in Paris sponsored by Cristina Belgiojoso in 1837. In addition to Thalberg’s Fantasy on Themes from Rossini’s Moses , Mayer recorded Liszt’s Niobe Fantasy , and his solo transcription of the Weber Konzertstück. Though difficult to obtain these days, it is well worth the effort to locate (ASV 783). After Jay Rosenblatt discovered and published the Concerto in E?, op. post.—usually referred to these days as Concerto No. 3—Mayer was among the first pianists to record the work. In collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Támas Vasáry, the disc also presented the first recordings of the De Profundis and the 1853 version of the Totentanz (ASV 778).


Judging from Mayer’s richly atmospheric and perfectly gauged performances, he must have lived with and reflected on the Wagner transcriptions for years. My favorites are the Recitative and Romance (“Song of the Evening Star’) from Tannhäuser and Am stillen Herd from Meistersinger . Mayer’s interpretation of Wolfram’s aria is a model of unaffected, heartfelt sentiment articulated with the utmost delicacy. His exquisite cantabile style is demonstrated in the grace with which he holds the line aloft, without neglecting the subtlest harmonic colors of the underpinning accompaniment. Liszt’s near-ecstatic peroration on Walther’s Am stillen Herd is delivered with appropriate abandon, in a delicious evocation of the naive enthusiasm and ardor of the young knight. No less convincing is the Entrance of the Guests into the Wartburg, in which the bustle and excitement of the crowd, punctuated by trumpet flourishes, is almost palpable. Any recording of the mighty Tannhäuser Overture, one of Liszt’s most inspired orchestral transcriptions and certainly among the most difficult, is bound to invite comparison with the readings of two other pianists, Benno Moiseiwitsch and Jorge Bolet, who made a specialty of the piece. If Mayer’s approach does not equal Moiseiwitsch’s coloristic brilliance or Bolet’s vision of unfolding drama, it is nevertheless a superbly convincing performance, unerringly musical, with deft renderings of the often complex textures and a tremendous momentum propelling the music forward. The Oberon transcription is one of three Liszt made of Weber’s opera overtures in 1846. This performance is as fresh and poised as the orchestral original, providing an extra dimension to a fine selection of Liszt’s loving transcriptions of German opera.


This is a welcome addition to the Naxos series, and one of the finer ones to date. It is a pleasure to encounter again the estimable artistry of Steven Mayer, a pianist from whom we can only hope to hear more. Warmly recommended.


FANFARE: Patrick Rucker

LISZT Années de pèlerinage , Book III: Les Jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este. Harmonies poétiques et religieuses: Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude; Funérailles. Nuages gris. 4 Little Piano Pieces : No. 2 in A?. Mephisto Waltz No. 1. BEETHOVEN-LISZT Adelaide. BACH-LISZT Fantasy and Fugue, S 463 • Garrick Ohlsson (pn) • BRIDGE 9409 (76:27)


A few months back, I was wowed by a blazing new Liszt recital from Valentina Lisitsa (see Fanfare 37:4). Here, on a solidly engineered disc featuring a pianist of an earlier generation, we get something substantially less dazzling, although in its own way even more impressive. Not that Ohlsson lacks technique: whether in the clarity of the voices in the Bach-Liszt Fugue or of the sprays of notes in Jeux d’eaux , Ohlsson strides through this often transcendentally difficult music with supreme and fully justified confidence. Still—and I mean this as a descriptive, rather than an evaluative, claim—there’s a maturity to the playing that we don’t hear in Lisitsa’s more exuberantly youthful and improvisatory performances.


For the most part (the closing Mephisto Waltz is the primary exception), Ohlsson has chosen from Liszt’s more sober works—and for the most part, his moderate tempos and (where appropriate) his bass-centered sonority give the details of the music a chance to sink in. More importantly, I think, he manages to probe beneath the surface of the music and (miraculously) to do so without sacrificing any of its immediate rhetoric. Thus, for instance, there’s no lack of virtuoso sparkle in Jeux d’eaux ; but Ohlsson is also unusually alert to its subtler emotional shadings, capturing the disarming splashes of nostalgic regret, in particular, as well as anyone. Similarly, while he can crush you with the climaxes of Funérailles , he’s unusually tender in the quieter moments, giving the work a nobility it doesn’t always have in the hands of more consistently extroverted pianists like Horowitz and Barere. In his appropriately enthusiastic review of Ohlsson’s previous Bridge Liszt recording (the Sonata and the Ad Nos Fantasy , 35:2), Patrick Rucker referred to Ohlsson’s “profound wisdom and almost excruciating beauty”—and the same overriding qualities certainly characterize this remarkable Funérailles , too.


Ohlsson also has an enviable sense of architecture. This emerges not only in his treatment of the individual works (there’s consistent impetus to Bénédiction , a work that can easily stall but that here provides an engrossing sense of journey), but also in his design of the program as a whole. I particularly enjoyed the way that Jeux d’eaux , which follows the joyful reading of the Bach-Liszt Fugue, serves as to prepare us for beauties of Bénédiction —as well as the way Nuages gris (played with remarkable finesse) and the second of the Four Little Piano Pieces provide a transition between the grimness of Funérailles and the dash of the Mephisto Waltz.


In sum, music-making that deserves to be savored. I hope that Bridge and Ohlsson have plans for continuing the series.


FANFARE: Peter J. Rabinowitz

Liszt turned to the composition of large-scale orchestral works after his success as a touring virtuoso and wrote a sequence of ground-breaking symphonic poems that in their narrative-driven structures directly influenced such composers as Richard Strauss and Sibelius. The piano transcriptions that Liszt supervised and produced saw these vivid scores transformed into the virtuoso piano medium in which form their pictorial richness could be enjoyed anew. This volume includes the memorably evocative Les Préludes and Orpheus.

Naxos’ survey of Liszt’s piano music seems to have been progressing in dribs and drabs, with little fanfare since its launch more than 20 years ago. However, if you’re a fan of Liszt and the highest order of transcendental virtuosity, grab Volume 41 right away. I first became aware of Han Chen, winner of the 2013 China International Piano Competition, as a commanding new music pianist, one of many in New York. He’s also a composer. Since most new music pianists don’t bother with Liszt (and when they do, it’s usually awful), I was prepared for the worst. Instead, I heard the best!
It isn’t just Chen’s assured, elegant and totally effortless technique that blows me away, it’s also his idiomatic flair, his use of color and touch to convey character, plus a gift for textural variety and differentiation that one associates with golden age legends. Listen to the Bellini Sonnambula Fantasy’s carefully sculpted climaxes and how the final pages’ buckets of chords and runs sing out with no strain, struggle or imbalance whatsoever. The Polonaise from I Puritani swaggers with joyful scintillation, while the convoluted thematic juggling in the Freischütz Fantasy conveys a sense of lightness and play that Leslie Howard’s premier recording keeps under wraps. The engineering replicates how a well-regulated concert grand sounds in a small hall with a luminous yet not overly resonant acoustic. Need I say more? - ClassicsToday

Remember Soyeon Kate Lee’s 2008 Zankel Hall recital, where she appeared in a concert gown constructed from 6000 recycled grape juice containers? Not surprisingly her outfit got more press than her actual music making, but the fact is that Lee is a splendid pianist who doesn’t need gimmicks. Her first appearance in Naxos’ complete Liszt piano music cycle attests to this.

Lee’s shapely and sonorous handling of the thick pianistic hurdles throughout Liszt’s transcription of the Sarabande and Chaconne from Handel’s Singspiel Almira holds interest in terms of technique and stamina, although the music is deadly dull. By contrast, Liszt’s paraphrase based on Gounod’s Hymne a Sainte Cecile thoroughly improves upon the original composition, where Lee’s contouring of the multi-thematic textural layers proves more pliable and forward moving than in Leslie Howard’s comparatively square (though no less sensitive) rendition.

So far as Liszt’s transcription from Joachim Raff’s forgotten opera König Alfred, Lee does not differentiate the opening Andante finale’s foreground and background material with Leslie Howard’s variety, yet she’s more animated and energetic in the subsequent Marsch. Lee also plays the Gounod transcriptions from Romeo et Juliette and La reine de Saba with a lovely lyrical sensitivity. The better known Valse from Gounod’s Faust paraphrase features scrupulous and crisply dispatched fingerwork, but the interpretation is a bit cut and dried, falling short of Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s glittery panache or the dynamic and rhythmic heft of Earl Wild and Egon Petri. However, she takes the opening section of Liszt’s transcription of Spohr’s Die Rose Romanze at a faster clip and with more vocally oriented phrasing than in Howard’s slower, more static traversal, heightening the music’s rich harmonic invention in the process. Annotations and engineering are first rate. In all, a strong entry in Naxos’ ongoing Liszt series.

-- Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

Although Liszt’s thirteen symphonic poems exist in two-piano transcriptions prepared by the composer himself, it was his Czech student August Stradal (1860–1930) who was to transcribe them for solo piano – versions which demand almost superhuman virtuosity. As the late Malcolm MacDonald writes in his booklet essay, Stradal’s versions ‘transform these revolutionary orchestral compositions into viable and effective piano works, faithfully preserving their masterly musical substance’. A Fanfare review of Volume One in this series had high praise for Risto-Matti Marin’s pianism: ‘One marvels at the stamina that can keep such a plethora of detail in place with such relentless élan; at his narrative shaping, which can turn up an already withering heat, so to speak, at climactic moments; at his overarching persuasiveness’. Risto-Matti Marin, who earned his doctoral degree from the Sibelius Academy in 2010, has recorded many internationally acclaimed solo piano albums, and several others of chamber music, his catalogue extending from the cornerstones of Classical/Romantic piano repertoire to rare original works, transcriptions and contemporary music. In addition to his work as a recitalist and chamber musician, he lectures on piano music and teaches in Finland and abroad.

In the 1970s LP cycles of Liszt’s transcriptions of Beethoven symphonies exercised some fascination. Those first forays by Cyprien Katsaris have been emulated by a fair few pianists since then.

August Stradal, whose life overlapped with that of the composer by some 26 years, has done a similar service for Liszt in making thoroughly grown-up versions of Liszt’s thirteen tone poems. Stradal was not the first – Malcolm Macdonald in his extended liner essay mentions that Carl Tausig prepared solo versions of eleven of the twelve works but some of these have been lost and what survives lacks the worked-through finesse and burly grandeur of Stradal’s efforts. Liszt made his own two piano version of these works but Stradal’s inspired efforts open the door to a much wider constituency. It is interesting to note that the orchestral versions themselves were prepared by Joachim Raff from Liszt’s piano manuscripts.

If you have already been drawn to Risto’s earlier Toccata volume then you will have acquired this one long before this review appears. Others dipping their toes into the cycle cannot fail to come away from the experience impressed.

The diminutive Orpheus drips self-absorbed romance and ominous atmosphere. Much of this mood-concentrated music exercises a sort of hypnosis on the listener – try the sustained slow-swirling introduction to Tasso. Hamlet establishes a similar spell. It has plenty of gloomy clouds but also grumbles, cascades and raves with Mephisto fury. In these aspects it is redolent of Malediction and Totentanz. Contrast the poetry with the Francesca da Rimini-style storms that follow. Risto is not short on panache as we can hear in the often resplendent final pages of these works. Hungaria follows Tasso. Alongside its struttingly rustic chivalry even the bombast works well. The shrill bagpipe whistle at the end of the poem comes off far more splendidly than it has any right to do from a ‘mere’ piano.

I am not at all sure that these solo versions do not work better as pieces of music than the orchestral editions which in Haitink’s (Philips) hands often had my attention drifting. Masur (EMI) was better as was Solti (Decca) but even they struggled.

Roll on Risto’s cycle of the Stradal Bruckner symphony arrangements. Stradal’s version of Bruckner 8 played by Risto is something I would very much like to hear. I can live in hope.

Meantime keep scanning the skies for vol. 3 of this eminent Liszt entry.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

On this new release, a young, talented Italian pianist plays Liszt’s greatest works in St. Petersburg alongside the Saint Petersburg Music Hall Orchestra with conductor Fabio Mastrangelo. Alessandro Ambrosoli was born in Turin the 16th December, 1969. As a child, he took piano lessons with various teachers. Finally, at 12 years of age, he met Giorgio Costa, who was able to blend the complex personality of Alessandro Ambrosoli with his own musical knowledge and technical capacities. Under the guidance of Giorgio Costa, Alessandro Ambrosoli improved his natural talents, won prizes in a number of national and international competitions and took the decision to study Liszt, feeling that the music of the Hungarian composer was a positive challenge. His prior Liszt release received gleaming reviews, and this album, recorded in 2002 and 2015, will surely meet the same level of artistry.

Classical Music

REVIEWS:
BBC Music (3/98, p.72) - Performance: 3 (out of 5), Sound: 3 (out of 5) - "Liszt's symphonic poems call for performances that blend flamboyance and exalted lyricism - or, in other words, that revel in Romantic empathy....Fortunately, Michael Halász and the New Zealand Symphony offer real performances rather than unimaginative run-throughs....The orchestra...plays with considerable fire in extrovert passages..."

This third volume of Naxos' ongoing series of Liszt tone poems under Michael Halász is easily the best so far. These pieces have such a bad reputation today that I suspect listeners may be surprised to discover that they contain quite a bit of really attractive music. Festklänge begins with one of Liszt's most arresting ideas, remarkably modern in character with harmony that doesn't have to be chromatic to sound interesting. Halász and the New Zealand Symphony deliver a sparkling performance, impulsive and rhythmically taut, and the work sounds much shorter than its 18-minute length might suggest. That is no mean achievement in music that admittedly has structural issues and tends to drag in less enthusiastic hands.


Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne also goes very well. The natural sonics capture the atmospheric opening (with its then-novel bass drum rolls) very effectively. If you know your Sibelius, you will recognize these first few minutes as the conceptual forebear of the Finnish composer's En Saga. Yes, the work's various sections tend to lie side by side rather than flow inevitably into one another, but it's a lovely piece that doesn't deserve its current neglect in the concert hall. Hunnenschlacht is just plain fun: a noisy battle followed by an organ-led apotheosis. Once again Halász and company deliver the goods, with fine playing and a vivid sense of drama. Also, to their credit, they don't linger over the less-interesting music representing the "good guys". In short, these are intelligent and effective performances that deliver maximum bang for your buck. Give them a shot.
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

In his 13 symphonic poems, inspired by the visual or literary arts, Liszt broke away from the standard four-movement-symphony, to create a one-movement composition of frequently contrasting moods unified through thematic transformations.