Dante Hollander

Prima Facie presents Salon and Stage, the second volume of Kenneth Hamilton's internationally acclaimed Liszt series. In contrast to the first album, Death and Transfiguration, this recording offers a life-enhancing selection of virtuoso transcriptions from song and opera. But it happily shares with its predecessor Hamilton's passion for these pieces. He has sought out Liszt's oft-ignored recommendations on their interpretation and studied the reminiscences and recordings of his students. He has, in effect, tried to think like a Liszt pupil, and to immerse himself in a performance tradition that goes well beyond the printed text.

Franz Liszt was without doubt one of the greatest (if not The Greatest) pianists of all time, as well as an innovating and visionary composer, in one word…a Genius!

Franz Liszt was without doubt one of the greatest (if not The Greatest) pianists of all time, as well as an innovating and visionary composer, in one word…a Genius!

Music, song, and poetry have long enjoyed a stimulating relationship; coming together for expressive ends and sometimes colliding in dramatic showdowns. None more so than in these vocal works by two composers who often explore extremes, Milton Babbitt and Michael Hersch. Babbitt’s ‘Philomel’ (1964) was an audacious stab at recasting conventions of song (such as voice with accompaniment) by redistributing the text between live voice, recorded voice, and analog synthesizer. The fragmentary words and syllables by poet John Hollander retell Ovid’s story of the rape and subsequent transformation of Philomel into a nightingale; aptly paralleled by the metamorphosis of the human and artificial sonorities.