Liszt: Le Triomphe funèbre du Tasse, S517 - download (MP3 & FLAC)

Franz Liszt was a master in the art of transcribing works for the piano, a selection of which appear on this recording alongside arrangements by Stradal, Klauser and Busoni.

This 5-CD set comprises a series of live recordings made by the Orchester Wiener Akademie and its conductor Martin Haselböck of orchestral music by Franz Liszt. They were released to mark the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth. It features all of the Symphonic Poems, the Dante Symphony and the beautiful Évocation à la Chapelle Sixtine. These critically-acclaimed performances from 2011 and 2012 are unique in that the orchestra performs on the original instruments or copies of the original instruments that were used at concerts conducted by the composer himself.

For “The Sound of Weimar” project, Liszt expert Martin Haselböck deployed the orchestra Wiener Akademie in exactly the size adopted for the original performances given by the Weimar Hofkapelle, and for the recordings made use of instruments that had either been played in concerts conducted by Franz Liszt himself or were faithful copies of such instruments. When the early CDs of the series appeared they were immediately described in such terms as “definitive recording”, “exemplary editions”, “a resounding success” or “a tonal phenomenon”. In addition to the symphonic poems this special edition also includes the Dante symphony, a work that was also composed at Weimar, and Évocation à la Chapelle Sixtine. Volumes 1 to 4 of the series won the International Franz Liszt Record Grand Prix in 2011 and 2012, and the series has received outstanding reviews in specialist magazines around the world.