Liszt Piano Sonata Hamelin

This year, April is Hamelin month at Hyperion; not content with giving us another blockbuster addition to the Romantic Piano Concerto series, the pianist gives us his contribution to the Liszt bicentenary. The Liszt Sonata is undoubtedly one of the peaks of the repertoire, and recordings are suitably copious, but when an artist of Hamelin’s virtuoso pedigree wishes to tackle it no excuse need be made for an additional version. The recital opens with a lesser-known masterwork, the Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H, and for light relief there is Liszt’s scintillating supplement to his Italian Année de Pèlerinage, the three pieces of Venezia e Napoli, but perhaps the emotional core of the recital is Liszt’s intensely spiritual Bénédiction du Dieu dans la solitude.

Leslie Howard’s recordings of Liszt’s complete piano music, on 99 CDs, is one of the monumental achievements in the history of recorded music. Remarkable as much for its musicological research and scholarly rigour as for Howard’s Herculean piano playing, this survey remains invaluable to serious lovers of Liszt.

It would be difficult to find two more dissimilar contemporaries than these two composers. Strongly influenced by Chopin, Liszt and Wagner, Scriabin exploits an unbridled level of sensuality and pushes conventional tonality to its very limits. Janáček is no less impassioned, yet confronts images of foreboding and tragedy in an assertive idiosyncratic language strongly tinged with folk music.