Liszt Années de Pèlerinage: I Suisse Libor Novacek, Piano

The church bells that he heard aged four, walking in the streets of Zurich with his parents, were the point of departure for the young Swiss pianist Francesco Piemontesi who still remembers this moment as a shock that violently brought home the power of music. The sonic beauty and harmonic richness in the tolling of the bells set something off in his unconscious, sparking a lifelong quest for the timbres and sonorities that he is so deft at bringing to life on his piano. At the age of five, he tried to reproduce the sound of the bells on a little toy piano; at twelve, he played Grieg's Concerto in A Minor and started to perform in public. But two years later he became aware of the limits of his technical abilities and also of the strange tensions wracking his body.

Born in Tokyo, award-winning pianist Yuko Mifune moved with her family to New York City when she was six years old. In New York, her early studies were with Mitsuko Ichimura, Jerome and Ronit Lowenthal, and at the age of twelve she returned to Japan and continued her studies with virtuoso pianists Akiko Iguchi, Yoko Okumura, and Kazuko Yasukawa.

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.’

Stephen Hough has the ample virtuoso credentials to excel in these demanding exemplars of Romantic piano music. Only rarely do we miss the rhetorical flourishes or the big, burnished tone and philosophical depth of an Arrau, but this is a first-rate reading of wonderful piano music. Hough's performance of "Vallé d'Obermann," the longest by far of the Swiss book of the Années, is played like the large-scale tone poem it is, and he fully conveys the work's meditation on nature's mysteries. His tempo freedoms in "Au bord d'une source" help make this astounding "water music" a miracle of color and mood. Throughout, Hough's fleet fingers dazzle in the difficult passages and his tonal subtleties reflect the poetry in these nine pieces.

Liszt's three volumes of Annees de pelerinage are rarely recorded complete, largely because many pianists remain baffled by the dark-hued prophecy and romanticism of the third and final book. So it is particularly gratifying to welcome Lazar Berman's superb 1977 DG recordings back into the catalogue, particularly when so finely remastered on CD. Berman is hardly celebrated as the most subtle or refined of pianists, but at his greatest he combines grandeur and sensibility to a rare degree and his response to Book Three, in particular, is of the highest musical quality and poetic insight.

Adored by the world’s greatest orchestras andconductors, Nicholas Angelich was the idealchamber music partner for countless artists. Butbeyond his unique career, he was outstanding for his quality of listening, his extreme attention toothers and his total benevolence. His passing leaves a huge void that his rich discography, his recorded concerts and his many interviews for various radio stations will help to fill. Mirare wanted to commemorate him by celebrating the 20th anniversary of this recording of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage.