Hans Von Bülow: A Life And Times

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.

Hans August Alexander Bronsart von Schellendorf (generally known as Hans von Bronsart), once a force to be reckoned with in the musical life of his native Germany, is now hardly a footnote in most reference books. Record collectors of a certain vintage will have bought Michael Ponti playing the same F sharp minor concerto presented here, a recording made back in 1973 for the Vox Candide label with the Westphalian Symphony Orchestra under Richard Kapp, one of very few recordings of any of Bronsart’s work. Otherwise, it is probably only keen Lisztians who will know that having revised his piano concerto No 2 in 1856, Liszt chose Bronsart to give the premiere (Weimar, 7 January 1857) with himself as conductor. When the final version was published in 1863, Bronsart was the dedicatee. These were significant gestures. Immediately, one is intrigued. Who was this Bronsart of whom Liszt thought so highly?

Liszt, according to the great British pianist John Ogdon, was responsible for ‘breaking the Germanic stranglehold on nineteenth-century composers, and scattering the seeds of modern music almost literally to the four winds. His music shows an avant-garde attitude to the problems of composing which was without parallel in the nineteenth century.’