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A pianist’s dream: a rare and precious testament of a great pianist’s vision (Busoni) of another’s (Liszt) work.

Very popular repertoire in extremely rare versions.

Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) was one of the most gifted pianists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as being a composer of considerable importance and vision. A child prodigy, he debuted at the age of 12, being quickly marked out as a piano virtuoso unlike any other. His reputation for many years rested on his remarkable transcriptions of J.S Bach, which tended to overshadow both his original compositions and his other transcriptions.

This CD contains his complete transcriptions of Liszt. The tradition of a pianist transcribing another composer’s music for his own use was time honoured when Busoni made his versions of Liszt’s music. However whereas most pianist adapted works to suit their style and technical abilities, Busoni went a step further and wrote everything down, often illuminating his choices with rational and pertinent explanations for his changes. Busoni wrote in 1909 ‘I no longer play the piano with my hands’ - his intellectual, thought provoking approach to piano playing and his interpretational genius had taken his performances and his view of the music to another level altogether. Listening to these transcriptions is the nearest we can get to hearing Liszt’s music through the eyes, ears and mind of one of the finest musicians and greatest pianists the world has seen.

Four organ showpieces performed of the Great organ of Milan Cathedral.

Franz Liszt was a master at taking well-known tunes from popular operas and turning them into highly effective concert paraphrases for piano and orchestra. He had already produced 3 based on Meyerbeer’s 1849 hit opera Le Prophet. The fourth work was to be a vast fantasie and fugue for organ taking the tune sung in Act I by the three Anabaptists urging people to see the error of their ways.

Max Reger’s fantasies for organ are, like Liszt’s works, virtually symphonic poems for solo organ. The op40/2 work is divided into 6 movements, and each mirrors the text of the Protestant chorale on which the work is based – anger, sin and love - all are depicted here.

Cesar Franck’s Piece Heroique is the last of his Three Pieces for organ composed in 1878 for the inaugural concerts of the new Cavaille-Coll organ in the Salle des Fetes in the Palais du Trocadero. The Franco-Prussian war had just ended, and the French had been defeated. The troops marched through Paris in 1871. It must have been a sombre procession. Franck’s work is rather more funereal than jingoistic – its emotions are ambivalent.

Just as Liszt was a piano virtuoso, Edwin Lemare was the foremost organ virtuoso of his time. Taking a work by another piano virtuoso – Camille Saint- Saens’ orchestral symphonic poem Danse Macabre (already Liszt had transcribed the original for piano) and transcribing it for organ Lemare created one of the most famous of organ showpieces.

Many of Liszt’s works were transcribed for other instruments; both by the composer himself and other musicians. These hauntingly beautiful pieces for cello and piano were originally written for piano solo or the voice. They are from the final period of his life and are the product of his old age and his quest for spirituality. Far from the virtuoso brilliance of his earlier works, their intense and romantic melodies express melancholy and desolation, the sparse textures and harmonic instability daringly looking forward to the twentieth century.

The rich and warm expressive qualities of the cello undoubtedly make these pieces even more effective. The most significant work in this collection is La lugubre gondola, a compelling piece written after Liszt had a premonition of Wagner’s death. It was inspired by the Venetian gondola funeral processions he observed during a visit to the city to see Wagner. The music conveys the stillness of a Venetian lagoon, the unsettling harmonies also evoking the underlying darkness and despair. Another work with a very personal connection is the nostalgic Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth, a transcription of one of his songs. Nonnenwerth was an island in the Rhine where Liszt spent time with Marie d’Agoult and their children, and his fondness for the work resulted in many different versions for solo piano, voice and piano duet as well as this version for cello and piano. There are also transcriptions for cello and piano by other musicians of some of his most popular piano works, including the six Consolations, Angelus!

From the third volume of Années de Pelèrinages and the Liebestraum No.3. The performers of this moving collection of works are the Italian cellist Francesco Dillon and the pianist Emanuele Torquati. Francesco Dillon performs as a soloist and with chamber groups all over the world and has made several recordings of unusual cello repertoire, including an album of Schumann rarities for Brilliant Classics.

Beyond the two piano concertos and occasional performances of Totentanz, little is heard of Liszt’s music for piano and orchestra, though an interest in the composer sparked by ‘complete’ sets of his vast output has lately increased attention on this spectacular music. What was already grand or passionate in themes by his predecessors, Liszt magnifies and intensifies in works such as the Fantasia on a theme from Beethoven’s ‘Ruins of Athens’, the Wanderer Fantasie after Schubert and the Grande Fantaisie Symphonique on themes from Berlioz’s ‘Lelio’, demanding the kind of bravura that only the finest of today’s pianists, such as Louis Lortie and Nelson Freire, can match up to.

Liszt composed only a small number of works for the organ, but among them are two of the most impressive works in the instrument’s repertoire. These works are contained on this CD, performed on an organ that has a direct link to Liszt.

In 1855 his pupil Alexander Winterberger played the Fantasia and Fugue ‘Ad nos, ad salutarum undam’ which Liszt had dedicated to Meyerbeer on the Friederich Ladegast organ at Merseburg Cathedral. The organ in Schwerin is almost identical to the instrument at Merseburg. The other major work Liszt composed for organ is the Prelude and Fugue on the name BACH. This was dedicated to Winterberger. The Fantasia and Fugue is a huge work lasting over half an hour, with a brilliant fantasia on a theme from Meyerbeer’s ‘La Prophete’. The meditative adagio is shattered by a violent fortissimo which leads into the fugue, and the heroic conclusion.

The Prelude and Fugue on BACH also opens brilliantly with the four notes that make up the name Bach undergoing endless ingenious variations. The fugue begins with a strange section where tonality is suspended for a time, with the four note ‘name’ appearing as an ostinato under staccato chords.

The variations on ‘Weinen, Klagen’ from Bach’s Cantata no 12 was written for piano in 1860, and is remarkable for its use of chromaticism – again, tonality is under great strain.

Liszt’s songs are among his least performed works. With the bicentenary of his birth upon us, much of his output will be performed and recorded, and no doubt re-assessed. The composer himself was aware that he was difficult to categorise, and that the public face he had was as a flashy virtuoso pianist composer – a reputation that survives to this day, as the Rick Wakeman’s 1975s rock-opera ‘Lisztomania’ (filmed by Ken Russell, and starring The Who’s Roger Daltry as Liszt) testifies.

‘Everyone is against me: the Catholics because they find my music profane, the protestants because my music is Catholic, the Masons because they find my music too clerical. For the conservatives I am a revolutionary, for the futurists I am a phony Jacobin. For the Italians, in spite of Sgambati (his pupil and fellow composer), if they are Garibaldini they hate me because the think me a bigot, if they are on the Vatican’s side, they accuse me of turning the Tempio di Venere into a church. For Bayreuth I am an advertising agent rather than a composer. The Germans hate my music because they think it French, the French hate it because they think it German. For the Austrians I make Gypsy music, for the Hungarians I make foreign music. And the Jews hate me and my music without any reason.’

Interesting words, from a deeply frustrated Liszt. So how do we or should we find a definition for his music? The songs provide a fascinating clue. The writing for voice is clearly of Latin origin, skillfully woven into German Lied. Liszt manages to adapt the ‘feel’ of the music depending on the language he was setting – so a French text and the music ‘sounds’ of French origin and so on. Such stylistic flexibility can also be found in his orchestral, choral and solo piano works making this great composer a difficult customer in an age where we like to ‘pigeon-hole things. The songs require great skill from both singer and accompanist to reveal their many treasures.

“Campanella has much virtuosity and there is plenty of entrancing pianism: but he is also deeply thoughtful” Gramophone

Michele Campanella is internationally known as one of major interpreters and virtuoso of the Liszt repertoire, and has been awarded the Grand Prix du Disque three years (1976, 1977 and 1998, the latter for “Franz Liszt - The Great Transcriptions, I-II” with Philips) by the prestigious “Franz Liszt” Academy in Budapest.

Campanella has faced in over 40 years of career most of the principal pages of the piano literature In addition to his activity as a musician, Campanella adds the role of writer. On March 10th in the Spazio Risonanze del Parco della Musica of Rome, he will present his book Il Mio Liszt, that the pianist dedicates to his author of reference This box of hitherto unissued recordings will be a must for any pianophile. Michele Campanella is already known to such connoisseurs as a Liszt player of the highest distinction, who has played the composer’s music for many decades now.

These recordings were made in Italy in the last 10 years, and reveal him as an ever more acute interpreter of this often elusive music.

Most obviously demanding, of course, are the 12 Transcendental Studies, that ultimate synthesis of literary-inspired creative fire and technical wizardry. Two discs of Wagner transcriptions venture from the familiar and relatively straightforward (Isoldes Liebestod) to the transformative recreations, entirely worthy of the originals, wrought by Liszt on themes from Lohengrin and Parsifal.Then on a disc of Liszt is the well-known Rigoletto paraphrase but also transcriptions of music from Gerusalem and Simon Boccanegra. Altogether we encounter the protean genius of Liszt at his most flexible, responding to the appetite of his day for both operatic pot-pourris and for clouds of piano dreams.