Frage Und Antwort

Internationally renowned soloist Lucille Chung performs a programme of virtuosic and beguiling works by Franz Liszt. One of the first female students of the iconic Russian pianist Lazar Berman at the Accademia Pianistica in Imola, Italy, Chung has won numerous awards for her performances of Liszt’s music, including the B minor Sonata that features on this programme – although Lucille describes in her introduction to the programme how Berman “… for a time doubted that a diminutive lady with hands spanning a 9th (although I can now stretch a 10th on a good day) would ever succeed in playing Liszt well … Mr Berman came around.”

Liszt’s chamber music is not well known—to the extent that some music lovers often do not even know it exists—for the sole reason that, in large part, it consists of transcriptions, and the principle of transcription does not automatically inspire confidence in today’s musicians. Yet, aside from the few ‘originals’ proposed in this programme, the transcriptions were quite often realised by Liszt himself, for whom the concepts of transcription, reduction, adaptation or paraphrase were an integral part of musical creation. The works chosen for this recording meet two criteria: they all include a more-or-less solo cello part, and a good number of them come from the 1880-86 period, i.e., Wagner’s and Liszt’s last years.

Some works seem to echo one another, resounding across eras with a quasi-mystical correspondence that invites us into a strange voyage. Gathering ‘the last Liszt’ and ‘the last Scriabin’ on the same album struck me as obvious. To me, they both have a marvellously indescribable capacity to allow listeners to hear mystery, to create unique soundscapes, to explore ever further and farther, always to innovate and to extend the limits of a certain ending. Both question the conventions of harmonic language with drawn out chromaticism – one that goes almost to excess, inching close to its own demise – and the obfuscation of tonality, as well as Scriabin’s famous invention, the ‘mystic chord,’ which haunts most of his last works. We can therefore lose ourselves in exploration outside all form, skirting all rules, and necessarily giving ourselves over to the almost hypnotic sensation of getting lost in this extreme.