All four of these symphonic poems are performed here in outstanding fashion. Crisp, lively playing of symphonic masterpieces! Halasz and the Katowice give us a selection of the most famous symphonic poems, with major success. Just the right balance is struck throughout, with the quiet passages played gently & beautifully and when the music explodes this is classical thunder at it's best. The symphonic poems of Liszt caused some controversy. One of the most influential critics in Vienna, Eduard Hanslick, a champion of Brahms, wrote in 1857 of the impertinence of such an attempt: He fancies his music capable of fiddling and blowing the most magnificent phenomena of myth and history, the most profound thoughts of the human mind. Hanslick's objection was not to music with some extra-musical association, but to the vastness of the subjects tackled and what he saw as a reliance on an external program to justify an absence of musical content. The Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra of Katowice (PRNSO) was founded in 1945, soon after the end of the World War II, by the eminent Polish conductor Witold Rowicki. The PRNSO replaced the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra which had existed from 1934 to 1939 in Warsaw, under the direction of another outstanding artist, Grzegorz Fitelberg. In 1947 Grzegroz Fitelberg returned to Poland and became artistic director of the PRNSO. He was followed by a series of distinguished Polish conductors - Jan Krenz, Bohdan Wodiezko, Kazimierz Kord, Tadeusz Strugala, Jerzy Maksymiuk, Stanislaw Wislocki and, since 1983, Antoni Wit. The orchestra has appeared with conductors and soloists of the greatest distinction and has recorded for Polskie Nagrania and many international record labels. Michael Halasz Born in Hungary in 1938, Michael Halasz began his professional career as principal bassoonist in the Philharmonia Hungarica, a position he occupied for eight years, before studying conducting in Essen. His first engagement as a conductor was at the Munich Gartnerplatz Theater, where, from 1972 to 1975, he directed all operetta productions. In 1975 he moved to Frankfurt as principal Kapellmeister under Christoph von Dohnanyi, working with the most distinguished singers and conducting the most important works of the operatic repertoire. Engagements as a guest-conductor followed, and in 1977 Dohnanyi took him to the Staatsoper in Hamburg as principal Kapellmeister.

Franz Liszt inherited strong religious convictions from his father, and the influence of sacred narratives can be found throughout his compositions. Drawn from the so-called Tasso Sketchbook, the Préludes etHarmonies poétiques et religieuses were composed after the end of Liszt’s relationship with Marie d’Agoult, and include the passionately turbulent Langueur? Descriptive titles characterize many of the brief Album-Leaves, while the legend of St François de Paule marchant sur les flots depicts the saint crossing the Straits of Messina using his cloak as a sail after being refused passage by a boatman. Liszt’s famous Harmonies poétiques et religieuses has been visited in other volumes in this edition, but this is not to be confused with the Préludes et Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, which is a set of eight pieces also associated with the poetry of Alphonse de Lamartine, but entirely distinct in character and content. Including fragments, this is a further collection of Liszt rarities that offers fascinating pre-echoes of later masterpieces, exploring the composer’s wider responses to religious themes, Romantic poetry and the intensity of his own circumstances.

All of the pieces in this programme have a literary or artistic connection as the background to their creation. Heard here in their first version, the Consolations owe their title to a poem by Alphonse de Lamartine and include a melody that later became the first Hungarian Rhapsody. The meditative Sposalizio was inspired by a painting by Raphael, and the Ballade by Gottfried Burger’s haunting ‘Lenore.’ Victor Hugo’s Apres une lecture de Dante is used powerfully by Liszt to express damnation and hope, and the first Mephisto Waltz derived from Lenau’s ‘Faust’ depicts a dance both sinister and amorous. Born in Rijeka in 1981, Goran Filipec studied at the Ino Mirkovich Academy in Croatia, at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, and the Conservatoire national superieur de musique et de danse de Paris. During his early career, he was a top prizewinner of several international piano competitions. He performs across Europe, the US, South America and Japan as a recitalist and as a soloist with leading orchestras.

With his critically acclaimed AVIE Records recordings of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms, Gabriel Faure´ and Sergei Rachmaninov to his credit, the celebrated British pianist Charles Owen scales the heights of Franz Liszt’s anthology Annees de pelerinage, Premiere annee: Suisse (“Years of Travel, First Year: Switzerland”), which evokes the great 19th-century pianist-composer’s Swiss sojourns with aural impressions of the Alpine landscape, its peaks and valleys, mountains and streams, and the country’s distinctive folk music. Literary references abound as they do in the album’s concluding piece, the emotional Benediction de Dieu dans la solitude (“The Blessing of God in Solitude”) which was inspired by a poem penned by Liszt’s friend Alphonse de Lamartine. Emotions ran equally high for Charles Owen who turned to Liszt during lockdown. The uncertainty of being homebound throughout the pandemic was eased by the extra meaning and solace of the composer’s evocations of journeying, experiencing the natural world and its sense of beauty and liberation.

Paul Badura- Skoda plays the Chopin Piano Concertos (1954)

On her GENUIN debut release, splendid Polish pianist Aleksandra Mikulska presents Franz Liszt’s reminiscences of the great loves of his life: they include both people and places as well as his own works that had grown dear to him. With broad musical lines and a wonderfully sensuous tone, the Special Prize-winner at the 15th International Frédéric Chopin Competition breathes new life into some of the most beautiful works of the repertoire: the "Liebestraum" and "Hungarian Rhapsody" and the celebrated "Frühlingslied", an arrangement of the song by Robert Schumann – a true delight for piano lovers, and much more than just black and white!

With his birthplace of Budapest, Benedek Horváth (*1989) feels very close to his 'fellow countryman', the great virtuoso and cosmopolitan Franz Liszt. Important stages of his career are inseparably linked with this name and the interpretation of the visionary's piano works has kept him busy since his early years of study. Horváth completed his soloist diploma at the Basel Music Academy and received important artistic impulses from András Schiff, Dimitri Bashkirov and Menahem Pressler. He was a finalist at renowned competitions such as the Concours Clara Haskil in Vevey. In 2018 he was awarded the 'Junior Prima', one of the most important cultural prizes in Hungary.

The hugely talented pianist, Chiyan Wong makes his recording debut with the phenomenally difficult Liszt transcriptions of well-known opera melodies. A broad and thoughtful musician, Wong's special interest in the music of Franz Liszt has led to him perfecting his own editions of these popular operatic fantasies. Following Liszt's own advice regarding transcriptions, Wong concentrates on communicating the spirit and intention of the music whilst applying his own personal touches. Chiyan Wong has been astonishing audiences with not just the sincerity and sheer authority of his playing, but also feted by critics and colleagues as a rising star of the piano world.

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REVIEW:

Beyond the technical polish he brings to these fiendishly challenging pieces, most striking is Wong's sincerity of purpose. While espousing a more personal approach to the music, his reverence for Liszt precludes any radical alteration of the scores in the name of pianistic exhibitionism. A project that could have easily lapsed into musicial disfigurement has instead been bolstered by understanding and conviction. Linn has captured Wong's sound in all its dimensions. By all means, have a listen.

– Gramophone

On his debut album, the young pianist Corbyn Beisner indulges in the complexity, mysticism and passion of major piano works by Franz Liszt. Since his performing debut in 2006 playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, op. 37, Corbin Beisner (born 1988) has been active as a classical pianist throughout Europe and the United States. Notable performances have included recitals at the Conservatoire Liceu in Barcelona, Spain, the Liszt Saal at the Accademia d’Ungheria in Rome, Italy, All-Liszt recitals throughout Switzerland, including a recital in the famous “Le Troi Roi” hotel in Basel, numerous concerts in Budapest, Hungary, and performances at the Liszt Summer Piano Festival at Schloss Schillingsfürst in Schillingsfürst, Germany.In the United States, he has been invited to perform by Chopin societies in Connecticut, Texas, the Chopin Foundation in Florida, and the American Liszt Society.

Freudvoll und leidvoll (Joyful and sorrowful)

The tenor joins forces with pianist Helmut Deutsch to perform a programme of songs by a largely neglected lieder composer, Franz Liszt.

After their album Selige Stunde, Jonas Kaufmann and Helmut Deutsch used the lockdown necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic, to make a further series of recordings. Their second album of songs is devoted to Franz Liszt, a composer for whom both feel a special affinity and whose music has long featured in their shared concert career.

Together with a group of six other songs including Vergiftet sind meine Lieder, Der König von Thule and Ihr Glocken von Marling, the demanding Petrarch Sonnets have been a part of Jonas Kaufmann’s repertory for many years, while Loreley, O lieb, solang du lieben kannst and Es muss ein Wunderbares sein are among his regular encores. As he himself explains, the process of studying lesser-known “jewels” such as Goethe’s eponymous Freudvoll und leidvoll, two versions of which are heard here, has been a period of intense discovery, during which time he has learnt to value these songs more than ever:

I’m very pleased that our enforced rest made this album possible – under normal circumstances it would probably not have come into existence quite so quickly. As a result we were able to record not only those Liszt songs that we had already tried out in the concert hall but also a number of others that until now have been overshadowed by Liszt’s “great hits”. Among them, pride of place goes to Die stille Wasserrose, which I find more beautiful the more often I hear it. I’m very grateful to Helmut for introducing me to these songs, and I think there will be many listeners who share my delight in these discoveries.

For Helmut Deutsch Liszt was one of the great idols of his youth, alongside Elizabeth Taylor and Herbert von Karajan:

Thanks to these jewels, Liszt deserves to occupy a leading place in the history of the art song, and yet even today he is denied this status. It is a source of tremendous pleasure for me that I have been able to share my enthusiasm with Jonas Kaufmann and persuade him to record an entire album with me.

This collection contains the most important recordings by Alfredo Perl with piano works by Franz Liszt. A special highlight is the recording of the piano concertos with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Alfredo Perl studied with Carlos Botto at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Günter Ludwig at the Musikhochschule in Cologne and Maria Curcio in London. He gave his first concert at the age of nine and then performed throughout South America and Europe as recitalist and with the Santiago Philharmonic Orchestra and the Zagreb Symphony Orchestra. Perl has since been a prizewinner in major competitions, including the Ferruccio Busoni Competition in Bolzano and the Beethoven Competition in Vienna, and he won first prize at the International Piano Competition in Montevideo. Alfredo Perl is professor for piano at the Detmold University of Music and has been artistic director of the Detmold Chamber Orchestra since 2009.

Born in 1994, the British pianist Tyler Hay is a scholarship student at the Royal College of Music where he continues his studies with the eminent piano pedagogue Niel Immermann. He already has an impressive concert diary of recitals and concertos throughout the UK and beyond: this is his debut recital, concentrating on a composer for whom he feels a particular affinity. Indeed his advocacy of Liszt has been recognised in the Liszt Society Competition in November 2016, when he won first prize. Tyler Hay’s Liszt recital ranges over the composer’s protean output. It opens with the Gothic splendour and intricate counterpoint of the Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H but immediately continues in the much more intimate and elusive idiom of the first of the Valses oubliées, which are dispersed like hidden treasure throughout the album. Composed between 1881 and 1885, the Valses are fully representative examples of a ‘late style’ in Liszt, reflective mood-paintings that shift between pensiveness, resignation, and reverie. More extrovert works are interleaved with them. Tyler Hay plays Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este, the shimmering masterpiece of tone-color from the second book of the Années de pèlerinage. There is also the pianistic thunder and lightning of the First Mephisto Waltz, and the D flat major First Ballade, before a return to Gothic grandeur and Bach with the Variations on ‘Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen’. Tyler Hay closes this assured debut recital, appropriately enough, with a farewell: the Abschied which is a setting of a Russian folksong supplied to Liszt by his pupil Alexander Siloti: a model of quiet simplicity and one of the composer’s most touching miniatures.

Franz Liszt had an overwhelming impact on the musical life of his time through revolutionary innovations in harmony, form and pianistic technique. Both Liszt and his brilliant musical heir Ferruccio Busoni regarded their compositions as living entities, always suitable for recycling and reshaping to create new works. This program is an illustration of this practice, with Goran Filipec freely extending and varying the cadenzas in the Hungarian Fantasy, while Busoni enhances the emotional states of horror, grotesque comedy and sublime serenity in the Totentanz. Goran Filipec is renowned for his exceptional interpretations of the works of Franz Liszt and the high virtuosity of his Classical and Romantic repertoire. A laureate of several international piano competitions, Filipec has appeared internationally as a recitalist and soloist with symphony orchestras across Europe, the Americas and Japan. He has been invited on multiple occasions to the Mariinsky Theatre Contemporary Piano Faces festival, Progetto Martha Argerich and Dubrovnik Summer Festival. Filipec is co-founder and president of the Société Franz Liszt de Genève, which is devoted to the appreciation and study of the Hungarian composer’s oeuvre.

Liszt’s Etudes d’execution transcendante enshrine the spirit of High Romanticism, embodying extremes of expressive drama and technical virtuosity. His encyclopedic approach to technique is shown at its most dazzling in this cycle, heard here in the 1852 revision which Liszt himself declared ‘the only authentic one.’ Integration of musical and technical elements is absolute, and the music’s narratives are supported by dramatic physicality, an orchestral richness of sonority, and an exceptional coloristic quality. The young Moscow-born Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg is lauded across the globe as a deeply sensitive, insightful and compelling musician. Born in 1984 in Moscow, he moved to Tel Aviv at an early age, studying with his mother and then with Arie Vardi. He went on to win numerous awards, most recently the Second Prize at the Rubinstein Competition in 2011, and in 2013 he won First Prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition, catapulting his career to a new level.



REVIEW:

Boris Giltburg is a phenomenon. The music seems to ooze from every pore of his being, and he makes us think anew about what we are listening to. I renewed acquaintance with favored recordings from my collection (Ashkenazy, Berezovsky, Berman, Gekic, Kempf, Kultyshev, Strelchenko, Trifonov), but this one stands out for its ability to challenge the mind when thinking about Liszt’s magnificent opus.

– American Record Guide

Franz Liszt viewed his solo piano transcriptions of the Beethoven Symphonies as a means to disseminate these works and make them accessible to the general public. This, of course, was decades before Edison invented recorded sound, and a century before umpteen Beethoven cycles jockeyed for position on the CD racks. Why listen to Beethoven's symphonies on the piano, then, when orchestral versions are everywhere to be had? I can answer that question in four words: Liszt was a genius. He conveys the emotional essence of Beethoven's instrumentation in pianistic terms, with a sixth sense for when to fill in textures, as well as what to leave out. While the piano writing isn't particularly dense, the keyboard layout involves frequent register shifts and busy contrapuntal activity. Konstantin Scherbakov's stupendous technique and grounded musicianship allows him to bring these elements into play with fluent ease and rock-solid rhythm. He may not inflect the Fifth Symphony's slow movement as ravishingly as Glenn Gould, but he faces the finale's notey hurdles without resorting to Gould's overdubbing tactics.


The Second Symphony is even better. Scherbakov's swift and steady first movement introduction slides into the Allegro con brio with insidious ease, and his heartfelt, pellucid Larghetto virtually plays itself. No tempo compromises in the Scherzo and Finale are neccesary under this pianist's pliable, secure hands. If Naxos continues this segment of its Liszt cycle with Scherbakov, it will have a worthy foil to counter Cyprien Katsaris' more personalized idiosyncratic Beethoven/Liszt symphony survey. The resonant, full-bodied, and clear sonics clinch my enthusiastic recommendation.
--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com