Liszt

Pierre-Laurent Aimard honours Franz Liszt’s 200th birthday (October 22, 1811) with his most ambitious recording for Deutsche Grammophon to date. In this extensive 2-CD set, Aimard juxtaposes a selection of Liszt’s works with compositions by Liszt’s contemporaries and successors who were inspired by the Hungarian composer. Recorded live in Vienna’s Konzerthaus over two evenings, Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s Liszt project is a pinnacle of the Liszt Year commemorations.

Liszt's position as a composer for the Church has always been controversial. The paradox that the most modern composer of the age, the supporter of the revolutionary ideals of 1789, 1830 and 1848, ended up writing music for an institution regarded as a bastion of everything conservative and reactionary, has led to a questioning of Liszt's motives. With the rapidly advancing secularization of culture, Liszt was seen as disillusioned, and his decision to take minor orders in 1865 was considered a startling about-turn for one so worldly. In fact, Liszt wrote sacred music with reform in mind. The dismal state of church music in the first half of the nineteenth century, when it was common to hear opera cabalettas sung to liturgical words, encouraged him to go back to plainsong and the music of Palestrina for inspiration. Composed in 1865, the year he took minor orders, the Missa Choralis embodies these twin elements. The influence of plainsong pervades the thematic material, albeit refocused through Liszt's boldly original and expressively chromatic harmonic language.

As part of Liszt’s anniversary year Hyperion turns to some of the composer’s most underrecorded and underperformed works. Liszt’s piano music is so much in the foreground that his works for orchestra have been almost forgotten. Here we present a fascinating selection.

On May 3, 2024 STEINWAY& SONS releases Liszt: Transcendental Etudes / Sandro Russo (STNS 30233). As Mr. Russo writes in his liner notes, the Transcendental Etudes embody some of the most significant traits of Liszt’s prolific “Weimar” period: the quest for new aesthetics of sound; an evident simplification of textures (as suggested by Schumann); and a stronger-than-ever penchant for programmatic elements derived from literature, nature, and the visual arts. Liszt also brought a new, truly poetic dimension to these Etudes by adding highly evocative titles to ten of them.

The virtuoso pianist and exclusive Chandos artist Louis Lortie here performs all three books, or ‘Years’, of Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage), a work rarely recorded in its entirety. Lortie has made more than thirty recordings for Chandos, covering a repertoire from Mozart to Stravinsky. His recording of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Variations won an Edison Award; his disc of works by Schumann and Brahms was judged one of the best CDs of the year by BBC Music, and his interpretations of Liszt’s complete works for piano and orchestra and of Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas were both selected as Editor’s Choice in Gramophone.

The Transcendental Études (French: Études d'exécution transcendante), S.139, are a set of twelve compositions for piano by Franz Liszt. They were published in 1852 as a revision of an 1837 set (which had not borne the title "d'exécution transcendante"), which in turn were – for the most part – an elaboration of a set of studies written in 1826.