Szechenyi

In the autumn of 2005 Hyperion released their complete Schubert song edition, some 18 years after they started recording. The composition of these songs spanned the same number of years. Between Lebenstraum … gesang in c”, a fragment dating from 1810 when he was thirteen and Der Taubenpost written a few weeks before his death late in 1828, Schubert set over 700 texts, mostly solo songs but also part songs and for ensemble. Almost all were with piano accompaniment. Everything that has survived is included

This latest album in the Complete Piano Music series of Franz Liszt is devoted to memorialising the dead. Historical Hungarian Portraits dates largely from 1885 and commemorates significant figures in the country’s recent past, including politicians, a poet and a musician. The mood is powerfully sombre. Liszt marked his son-in law Wagner’s death with Am Grabe R. Wagner (‘At the Grave of Richard Wagner’) using a theme from Parsifal. But the most intense and forward-looking of these pieces is Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, a foretaste of the experimental piano writing to come.