Liszt

Franz Liszt - Tasso, Totentanz, Piano Music
Claudius Tanski (Piano) / Beethoven Orchester Bonn / Stefan Blunier
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 200 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: MDG "Gold" # 937 1678-6 | Country/Year: Germany 2011
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic

Happy birthday, Franz Liszt! The Beethoven Orchestra Bonn under its conductor Stefan Blunier and the pianist Claudius Tanski present orchestral works and piano music by this Austro-Hungarian great, including the overture to Goethe’s Torquato Tasso and the Totentanz of 1849, on the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of his birth. A finely nuanced extra comes in the form of an orchestration of La lugubre gondola by John Adams.

Franz Liszt: Harmonies du soir – Neslon Freire, piano
Classical | 1 CD | EAC Rip | 205 MB (3% recovery) | FLAC+LOG+M3U+Cue | Full scans | RS & FS links
Publisher: Decca | Recorded: 2011 | Published: 2011

In short, Freire's gorgeous, utterly inspired Liszt playing belongs in every piano lover's collection. -Jed Distler www.classicstoday.com
With his new CD appropriately titled "Harmonies du soir" Nelson Freire brings a magnificent homage to Franz Liszt's bicentenary. This is a tremendous disc. Highly recommended. - Marc Haegeman; www.classical.net

Liszt’s Dante Symphony is a work of astonishing imagination. His evocation of the ‘Inferno’, the shade of Francesca da Rimini and her sad remembered love is marked by strokes of genius which, with bewildering frequency, pre-empt the mature Wagner (who was, incidentally, the dedicatee of the work). If the second and third movements – the ‘Paradiso’ was wisely commuted to a setting of part of the Magnificat plus a brief Hosanna – don’t quite match the sweep and control of the first, they have their own particular magic. Even so, the work has not acquired the popularity of the Faust Symphony. Barenboim’s new recording with the Berlin Philharmonic is thus particularly welcome. Not only does it augment the number of available recordings to four, it is also the most polished. Even performing ‘live’, the Berlin Philharmonic turns in a performance of near-perfection – the solo lines are a particular joy.

The organ played a relatively large part in Franz Liszt’s oeuvre, and there are dual organ and piano versions of a number of his works, but some of the pieces specifically intended for piano also translate well to the organ.