Liszt: Liebestraum, S541 No. 3 (Nocturne in A flat major) ('O Lieb, so lang'; Rêve d'amour)

The first international compilation devoted to one of DG / Universal’s greatest young pianists, YUNDI.

It started back in 2000, when he won the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw and went on to record six albums as an exclusive DG artist. Now here’s a distillation of those recordings, both solo and concerto in a fascinating flow of virtuosic and dreamily romantic music.

This midprice release includes the several selections from Chopin, Liszt and Schumann, as well as from the Ravel and Prokofiev piano concertos. There is also some Scarlatti and Mozart – over 80 minutes great music and exceptional playing in a seamless sequence.

This CD showcases Backhaus’s great virtuosity.

The second album of Vanessa Benelli Mosell, one of the most exciting pianists of the younger generation, contains a selection of works which Liszt regularly performed himself during his piano recitals (the piano recital itself, being a showcase for one artist only, was invented by Liszt). The works share a quality to impress the audience, whether through hair-raising pyrotechnics (Hungarian Rhapsodies, Grand Galop Chromatique), or heartfelt sentiment (Liebestraum). Vanessa’s first album (Brilliant Classics 94209) was met with great enthusiasm from the international press.The Gramophone wrote: “Prodigious playing that combines the blazing virtuosic demand and her natural musical insight…great panache… sparkling technique in demanding music…she leaves no doubt of her enviable facility”. New

recording, newly written liner notes. A second disc from the brilliant young Italian pianist brings a focus on the 19th century lion of piano music whose anniversary was celebrated last year.

The first Brilliant Classics disc from Vanessa Benelli Mosell included music by Prokofiev and Scriabin: a test for even the most engulfing virtuoso. "Sparkling technique in demanding music", "She leaves no doubt of her enviable facility through out this, her ultra-demanding debut album", "Dextrous and cool-headed, she launches into Prokofiev's Seventh Sonata at a cracking pace...she is off like a rocket in the drum-beat 7/8 Precipitato finale, remarkably maintaining her impetus in the ever-widening leaps of the closing pages." Gramophone, November 2011 This new Liszt disc is structured after the fashion of a recital such as the composer himself might have given; with shorter and lighter items sprinkled among unabashed showpieces, and in the centre, an exploration of the composer’s complex relationship with his homeland expressed through native melodies and dances transmuted into new forms through the fantasymedium of the Hungarian Rhaposody. To finish, the fireworks of the Grand galop chromatique, beloved of Cziffra, Bolet and others in whose pianistic footsteps Vanessa Benelli Mosell dances with abandon.

Born in Kiev, Ukraine, Valentina began playing the piano at the age of three and performed her first solo recital just one year later. She has won prestigious awards for her playing internationally, including the Murray Dranoff Two Piano Competition (together with her husband Alexei Kuznetsoff).

Valentina Lisitsa has already performed at major international venues including Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall in New York and the Vienna Musikverein, and in countries as far apart as the Netherlands and Brazil. She has played with renowned orchestras including Chicago Symphony, Seattle Symphony, San Francisco Symphony and the Pittsburgh Symphony, collaborating with conductors Manfred Honeck, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Jukka-Pekka Saraste, among others. Upcoming performances are confirmed with the Rotterdam Philharmonic, Philharmonie im Gasteig, Munich with Münchner Symphoniker and recitals at the Victoria Hall in Geneva and Philharmonie in Berlin.

With more than 43 million views and over 52,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, the young pianist is not only one of the fastest-rising stars of the international concert scene but probably the single most-watched classical musician, having rapidly overtaken long-established giants of the piano world in terms of global online viewing figures.

Although the works of Liszt were not a central part of Richter’s repertoire, he was one of the twentieth century’s important Liszt interpreters and was deeply committed to the works which he did play. In this collection we can hear his delicacy, tenderness and great lyric power in the two Liebesträume and contrasting ferocity in the Mephisto Waltz No.1. These are new digital restorations.

Two pupils of the great Julius Katchen are featured in the piano music of Liszt on this 2CD set. Pascal Rogé was eighteen years old when he recorded the Liszt Piano Sonata, Mazeppa, Vallée d’Obermann and the third Liebestraum in London in December, 1969. It was during the 1967 International Competition Georges Enesco that Rogé was first discovered. He was sixteen, the only Frenchman to reach the finals, and he won a prize even though he was the youngest competitor. In Paris, where he was unanimously awarded First Prize for the Piano at the Conservatoire (in Lucette Descaves’s class) when he gave his first recital, Le Figaro wrote: ‘… Here is an exceptional personality and already much more than a hope: a gold mine’. The International Herald Tribune praised him with these words: ‘… his remarkable technical prowess, but also style and ability to draw his audience into his line of focus and hold it there. Such a quality is the sign of a true artist.’ Twelve years later, in 1980, he made another Liszt recording for Decca, this time of the Italian volume of Années de Pèlerinage. Both recordings are issued as part of this 2CD set, completed with Liszt recordings of both flamboyant pieces – the transcendental study Wilde Jagd, the second Legend ‘St. Francis of Paul walking on the waves’ – as well as the intimate, almost experimental late works. Born in Calcutta, India, of Viennese-Jewish parents, raised in considerable poverty, Jean-Rodolphe Kars was much admired in pianistic circles. Although his upbringing had been that of a secular Jew, he converted, in 1976, to Catholicism and was baptised in 1977. Mysteriously, in 1981, he put an end to his career as a pianist, entering the priesthood in 1986. All these recordings appear internationally on Decca CD for the first time.

An incomparably gifted pianist, Liszt was a stunning virtuoso, the creator of the solo recital and the father of modern piano technique, as well as being an intensely spiritual artist and a noble composer. “Liszt is not a pianist, he is a poet, whether he plays his own music or that of others,” Théophile Gautier wrote. The influence of the man who Lamartine called “the king of the piano” on the development of piano music was immense, and his piano music amounted to a passionate overture pointing the way to the future of the art.

Liszt considered virtuosity of the kind that makes such a powerful impression in his “Campanella” study (based on one of Paganini’s Caprices for solo violin) or the Mephisto Waltz to be a vital ingredient of the music and not an end in itself. A great admirer of Wagner’s harmonic language, he produced a number of transcriptions of the music of Wagner, which he realised with great brilliance.

Liszt took minor orders in 1863, and several of his works – such as Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, the third piece in the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (a title borrowed from Lamartine) – can be seen as central to his spiritual quest. He could also be lyrical, as in the celebrated Nocturne, which has become better known under the title Liebestraum, and melancholy or intimate, as in the Consolations, which he dedicated to Victor Hugo. As for the Jeux d’eau a la Villa d’Este (from the Années de pèlerinage), the extraordinary impressionism of this piece look forward to Ravel’s Jeux d’eau.