Liszt: Soirées de Vienne: valse-caprice No. 6 (after Schubert), D427 No. 6

Following on from her hugely successful Chopin recordings, renowned Canadian pianist Janina Fialkowska has recorded a personal selection of Liszt’s solo piano music.

“The playing is sheer bliss. If you buy one Chopin selection this year, make it Fialkowska’s” The Sunday Times

First off is a revelatory compilation of Liszt’s most daring and virtuosic piano music, a special celebration of his wild and crazy side from an array of great pianists – dazzling virtuosity, extreme harmonies and textures – a helter-skelter ride through his piano oeuvre, with just the occasional moment of relaxation.

From the first strumming chords of the First Mephisto Waltz to the spooky harmonies of La lugubre gondola and the obsessive threnody of Totentanz, a master of the instrument stands before us in all his glory.

Featured are such names as Géza Anda, Martha Argerich, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, Jorge Bolet, Shura Cherkassky, Vladimir Horowitz, Zoltán Kocsis, Lang Lang, Alice Sara Ott, Mikhail Pletnev, Sviatoslav Richter and Yundi Li.

Rarities include four first releases on CD by Jean-Rodolfe Kars and Egon Petri – the latter aMasters of the Old School, with two incomparable performances of transcriptions (of Mozart’s Figaro and Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) , guaranteed to bring the house down.

The young pianist Maltempo started to play at the age of 3. His extensive repertoire ranges from classical to modern composers. He is particularly fascinated by the piano transcriptions of Liszt, their spiritual and philosophical elements as well as by the range and depth of his works for piano and orchestra.

Though Hungarian by birth, and having studied at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, Louis Kentner, like so many others of Jewish origin, immigrated to London in the mid 1930s, aware that central Europe was not the best place to be at that time for someone of his race. He was to remain in London for the rest of his life, becoming very much part of British musical life both as pianist and, later, as teacher. His somewhat sensational London debut took place in the Aeolian Hall in October 1936 where he gave an all Liszt recital. As a direct result he was signed up by HMV and over the next fifteen years, in addition to much other repertoire, he made a large number of Liszt recordings which featured not only the often recorded etudes and Hungarian Rhapsodies but also premiere recordings of many of Liszt's more important, but then less well known, larger works. Our first APR title (APR5514) featured such unusual works as the Scherzo & March, the Berceuse and the first Polonaise; on the current disc, in addition to a number of the well known aforementioned etudes, we find a group of late pieces, including the bizarre Czárdás Macabre, which was only published in the year of its recording, and the Meyerbeer/Liszt 'Les Patineurs' scherzo. This later piece is one of Liszt's most brilliant operatic transcriptions, but is strangely little known. It is perhaps Kentner's most stunning recording and a fitting way to end this fascinating recital.

On 21 June 1987, before an ecstatic audience in Hamburg’s Musikhalle, 83-year-old Vladimir Horowitz gave the last concert of a career that stretched over nearly seven decades. The recital, taped by North German Radio (NDR), lay in their archives virtually untouched for more than 20 years (one encore was included in Deutsche Grammophon’s anthology The Magic of Horowitz in 2003). It is now being released in its entirety for the first time in any format. The repertoire is familiar, with Mozart and Schumann (Kinderszenen op. 15) to the fore. There is a last heroic assault on Chopin’s Polonaise in A flat op. 53 and the final scintillating encore is Moszkowski’s Etincelles, a Horowitz evergreen. The recording provides a unique souvenir of Horowitz’s final public appearance, where the sense of occasion and immediacy is palpable.

Few artists manage to keep up two careers at the speed that Patrick Rapold does. Born into an actor’s family in 1975, he studied acting in Hannover and Zurich and at the European Film Actor School in Zurich. Since then, he has appeared in more than 30 films for cinema and television. As of 1996, he started giving solo concerts on the piano both at home in Switzerland and abroad.

On La Campanella, his first album for Sony Classical, Patrick has regrouped some of the most famous piano encores in the catalogue. Bizet’s Carmen Variations and Chopin’s Prélude op. 28 No.20 along with Schubert’s Soirée de Vienne in Liszt’s adaptation of the piece, and obviously Liszt’s famous La Campanella – the title piece making this album a selection of some of the most highly esteemed Romantic piano works to date. Patrick Rapold resides in Zurich and Los Angeles.