Liszt: Années de pèlerinage, 3ème année (7 pieces), S. 163 (Years of Pilgrimage, 3rd year)

This 2CD set performed by the highly rated Korean pianist Seung-Yeun Huh features all three suites that make up Franz Liszt’s great piano masterpiece Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage).

Born in Seoul, South Korea, acclaimed pianist Seung-Yeun Huh has lived in Europe since the age of sixteen. After winning the Artists’ International Competition in New York, she was a great success when she made her debut at the Carnegie Hall. Since then she has performed with many great orchestras including the Baltimore Symphony and Austro-

Hungarian Haydn Philharmonic and conductors David Zinman and Adam Fischer. She has previously recorded a complete cycle of Mozart’s solo piano pieces for Ars Musici.

Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage) (S.160, S.161, S.163) is a set of three suites by Franz Liszt for solo piano. The composer's complete musical style is evident in this masterwork, which ranges from virtuosic fireworks to sincerely moving emotional statements. His musical maturity can be seen evolving through his experience and travel.

The third volume is especially notable as an example of his later style. It was composed well after the first two volumes and displays less showy virtuosity and more harmonic experimentation.

The German pianist Michael Korstick performs Liszt’s last major piano cycle, the Années de Pèlerinage – Troisième Année from 1883, written in the latter stage of his life when he visited Rome, Weimar and Budapest. Also featured on this disc is a supplement to Années de Pèlerinage II: Venezia e Napoli.

The virtuoso pianist and exclusive Chandos artist Louis Lortie here performs all three books, or ‘Years’, of Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage), a work rarely recorded in its entirety. Lortie has made more than thirty recordings for Chandos, covering a repertoire from Mozart to Stravinsky. His recording of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Variations won an Edison Award; his disc of works by Schumann and Brahms was judged one of the best CDs of the year by BBC Music, and his interpretations of Liszt’s complete works for piano and orchestra and of Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas were both selected as Editor’s Choice in Gramophone.

Liszt was an artist by nature. He seemed to feel and be affected by external influences far more deeply than most, and he was a master at translating these feelings into music. The first Year of the Années de Pèlerinage, a reworking of pieces from his earlier Album d’un Voyageur, was inspired by his travels in Switzerland as a young man. In this work, the music does not depict or describe particular scenes or landscapes, rather it attempts to communicate the feeling that Liszt experienced when he saw them, his ‘strongest sensations and most lively impressions’.

‘Chapelle de Guillaume Tell’, for example, depicts a fourteenth-century Swiss hero through a broad and stately theme that quotes a Swiss Alpine horn melody with trumpet calls, echoes, and tremolos. ‘Au lac de Wallenstadt’ depicts the gently rising and retreating waves of the lake, over which Liszt places a theme of beautiful simplicity.

The second Year was inspired by the art and literature that Liszt encountered on his travels in Italy. ‘Sposalizio’ was inspired by Raphael’s painting The Marriage of the Virgin in the Brera in Milan, and ‘Il Penseroso’ by Michelangelo’s statue on the tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence.

The third and last Year of the Années de Pèlerinage was written much later, when Liszt was in his sixties, and at a time when both the man and the style of his music had undergone a vast change. The pieces show far more simplicity in the treatment of the musical components and often convey a mood of despair and stark austerity.

From the outset, Liszt knew that his Années de Pèlerinage was unlikely to appeal to the masses. In his own words, the work was ‘written for the few rather than the many – not ambitious of success, but of the approval of that minority which conceives art as having other uses than the beguiling of idle hours, and asks more from it than the futile distraction of a passing entertainment’.

With this recording of the complete Années de Pèlerinage by Franz Liszt, the celebrated French pianist Bertrand Chamayou makes his own personal musical statement to celebrate the composer’s 200th anniversary. During the anniversary year Bertrand Chamayou has undertaken the monumental feat of playing the whole of this set of pieces in a single three-hour performance at many leading venues throughout the world.

Pianist Bertrand Chamayou was born in Toulouse in 1981, and is among the most sought after personalities on the music scene today. After he became a prize-winner at the international Long-Thibaud competition at in 2001 Bertrand’s talent was spotted by pianist Jean-François Heisser who was later to become his professor at Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique. He went on to complete his training with Maria Curcio in London and was given precious advice by such great masters as Leon Fleisher, Dimitri Bashkirov and Murray Perahia. Recent solo engagements include the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Théâtre du Châtelet, the Lucerne Festival, and performances with amongst others the Orchestre de Paris, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the WDR Sinfonie Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

South Korean-born Sinae Lee leads a busy life as a soloist, chamber musician and lecturer based in Glasgow, UK. Since her UK début with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO), playing Brahms Piano Concerto No.1, she has also played with the Korean Symphony Orchestra, St. James Orchestra, Glasgow Orchestral Society, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) Wind Emsemble and RCS Orchestra.

She has frequently appeared in concerts in New York, St. Petersburg, Riga, London, Edinburgh and Glasgow as well as in her native cities in Korea such as Seoul, Suwon and Busan.

In Korea, she studied piano at Yewon School and Seoul Arts High School. After obtaining a Bachelor of Music with Distinction at Seoul National University, Sinae was offered a place to study at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) with a full scholarship awarded by the Inches Carr Trust. A year later she obtained MMus with Distinction at RCS. While studying in Seoul, she won many prestigious prizes, such as the Chung-Ang Daily Newspaper competition, and the Korean Music Association for Overseas competitors.

Sinae studied piano with Hwa-Young Yi, Hyoung-Joon Chang in Korea and Philip Jenkins in UK. Since 2001, Sinae has been teaching piano as a Lecturer in the department of Keyboard and Collaborative Piano at RCS.

Between June and July 2011, she performed the entire series of the Années de Pèlerinage by Liszt in UK and in Korea, celebrating the 200 anniversary of his birth. This recording was made in the recording studio at RCS, straight after giving recitals at RCS in June 2011.