Liszt The Complete Piano Music

Not all of the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies are flat-out showpieces like the best-known ones, so this disc makes for a better listening program than you might expect. And Jénö Jandó, who must be the hardest-working pianist in the recording business, has a real flair for this music. He plays with the combination of free rhythms and virtuosity that the music demands, and he even indulges in a bit of improvisation when the spirit moves him. This was probably something Liszt did himself, and other great Liszt interpreters such as Rachmaninov and Cziffra have done the same thing. Jandó doesn't quite have Cziffra's overwhelming virtuosity, but he plays musically and the result is a highly entertaining disc.

I have been interested in Liszt’s transcriptions of his own songs for several years, and it is with great enthusiasm that I share this recording with a worldwide audience. All of the tracks on this album are Liszt’s transcriptions of his own vocal works: both volumes of Buch der Lieder, the second version of Die Loreley, and three short transcriptions of choral works by Liszt.

This latest album in the Complete Piano Music series of Franz Liszt is devoted to memorialising the dead. Historical Hungarian Portraits dates largely from 1885 and commemorates significant figures in the country’s recent past, including politicians, a poet and a musician. The mood is powerfully sombre. Liszt marked his son-in law Wagner’s death with Am Grabe R. Wagner (‘At the Grave of Richard Wagner’) using a theme from Parsifal. But the most intense and forward-looking of these pieces is Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, a foretaste of the experimental piano writing to come.

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!

The start of another Hyperion Lieder series is always cause for celebration. In advance of his bicentenary in 2011, we turn to a composer whose songs, against the vast bulk of his compositions in larger genres, were considered insignificant for well over a century.