Liszt: Funérailles (Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, S. 173 No. 7), etc.

2010

“Arnaldo Cohen's playing blazes with the risk-taking, spontaneity and urgency of a live concert.
His Funérailles is a truly great performance, perfectly structured, a real sense of angry desolation, and the central 'cavalry charge' emerging more logically from its context than in any other account. In the Rhapsody, he provides the requisite bravura thrills but also does Liszt the honour of eschewing the vapidity which so many bring to it. Vallée d'Obermann emerges as an inspired dramatic tone poem, to which Cohen adds the element of white-hot improvisation; in colour and temperament he yields little to Horowitz's famous RCA recording (nla). The Liszt Sonata, Cohen's second recording, mingles narrative and textual clarity with a musical maturity and heady virtuosity in the Richter class.”