Liszt

In celebration of the Liszt year 2011, multi-award winning pianist Nelson Freire has personally selected the repertoire for his latest recording - his contribution to the anniversary of the pianist-composer's birth in 1811. The very personal selection includes Liszt showpieces such as the Harmonies du soir (12 ètudes d'exécution transcendante), the Hungarian Rhapsodies and Liebestrëume.

Tzimon Barto is recognised as one of the foremost American pianists of his generation. His new double-CD for Ondine features Paganini variations by three composers, Liszt, Brahms and Lutoslawski, and the popular Paganini Rhapsody Rachmaninov, on which Christoph Eschenbach conducts the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra. The Schlewig-Holstein Festival Orchestra was founded by Leonard Bernstein in 1987. This recording is Tzimon Barto’s 5th Ondine release.

A spectacular tribute to Hungarian-born composers, from the brilliant, award-winning performers - Grammy-nominated violinist ELMIRA DARVAROVA (first and only woman-concertmaster of The Metropolitan Opera) and pianist THOMAS WEAVER (professor at Curtis Institute of Music), the album "FROM LISZT TO LIGETI" brings an exceptionally vivid narrative linking historic milestones in the legacies of a number of superb Hungarian-born musicians - composers and performers, who have so enormously contributed to enriching the world's cultural treasure-trove.Liszt, Joachim, Bartok, Kodaly, Hubay, Goldmark, Ligeti - they have all bequeathed us masterpieces to behold and cherish, throughout several centuries of showcasing, shaping, preserving, and amalgamating national traditions and global influences through the prism of their own personal creative gifts.

For while it would be idle to pretend that this 70-year-old virtuoso, struck down at the height of his career with psoriatic arthritis, still commands the velocity and reflex of his earlier years, his later Chopin and Liszt are a tribute to a devotion and commitment gloriously enriched by experience. The First Impromptu is piquantly voiced and phrased while the C sharp minor Etude, Op. 25 No. 7, could hardly be more hauntingly confided, more ‘blue’ or inturned. How you miss the repeat in the C sharp minor Mazurka, Op. 50 No. 3 (not Op. 15, as the jewel-case claims), given such cloudy introspection and if there are moments when you recall how Rubinstein – forever Chopin’s most aristocratic spokesman – can convey a world of feeling in a scarcely perceptible gesture, Janis’s brooding intensity represents a wholly personal, only occasionally overbearing, alternative; an entirely different point of view. Time and again he tells us that there are higher goods than surface polish or slickness and in the valedictory F minor Mazurka, Op. 68 No. 4 he conveys a dark night of the soul indeed, an emotion almost too desolating for public utterance… Janis is no less remarkable in Liszt, whether in the brief but intriguing Sans mesure (a first performance and recording), in a Sonetto 104 del Petrarca as tear-laden as any on record and in a final Liebestod of an exhausting ardour and focus.