Liszt

"Liszt is a composer who has been closely associated with Mr. Wild throughout his long career. In New York City in 1961, he gave a monumental recital celebrating the 150th anniversary of Liszt's birth. In 1986, honoring the 100th year of Liszt's death, he gave three recitals entitled "Liszt The Poet", "Liszt The Transcriber" and "Liszt The Virtuoso", in NY's Carnegie Hall. Championing composers such as Liszt long before they were fashionable, is part of the foundation on which Mr. Wild has built his long and successful career."

Franz Liszt and Olivier Messiaen don't usually spring to mind as similar figures, let alone as an expected pairing for an album, since the former was the arch-Romantic virtuoso pianist and tone poet, while the latter was an influential modernist composer and organist. Yet both men were devout Roman Catholic musicians with mystical ideas that found expression in their works. To be sure, this disc by pianist Fredrik Ullén illustrates the differences between them by presenting their solo piano pieces in alternation, so the listener is never lulled by one style or the other but stays attentive throughout the program.

American pianist and scholar Michael Kaykov plays an array of Liszt's most powerful piano pieces, including the Sonata in B minor, as well as two of Beethoven's 'Sechs geistliche Lieder von Gellert' in transcriptions by Liszt, on whom Beethoven once bestowed a 'kiss of consecration'. Of these Beethoven songs we hear Liszt's arrangements of the noble, imposing 'Gottes Macht und Vorsehung' ('God's Might and Providence'), and the sombre 'Busslied' or 'Song of Penitence' a perfect fusion of Beethoven's original material with Liszt's enriched pianism.