Liszt: Complete Piano Music Volume 1

2010

“Arnaldo Cohen is as poetically and imaginatively intrepid as he's technically coruscating, and all these performances offer refinement and ferocity in equal proportion. Few pianists could identify or engage so closely with music that hovers on the edge of silence or extinction (Nuages gris, La lugubre gondola Nos-1 and 2), or that sparks and sports with a truly devilish intent (Danse macabre, Totentanz and so on). In the Danse macabre the music emerges from Cohen's fingers supercharged with malevolence. On the other hand he can send the F sharp Impromptu spiralling into a true sense of its ecstasy, or momentarily inflect Nuages gris in a manner that accentuates rather than detracts from its abstraction and economy. He makes something frighteningly bleak out of Unstern (or 'Evil Star'), with its savagely dissonant climax and its unresolved hymnal solace, yet is no less at home in Réminiscencesdes Huguenots, dismissing ambuscades of treacherous skips, octaves and every other technical terror with a telling mix of verve and nonchalance.
These, then, are performances of rare lucidity, virtuoso voltage and trenchancy, and all quite excellently recorded.”

1997

“It's a phenomenal disc.”