Liszt: Venezia e Napoli (3 pieces), S. 162

This year, April is Hamelin month at Hyperion; not content with giving us another blockbuster addition to the Romantic Piano Concerto series, the pianist gives us his contribution to the Liszt bicentenary.

The Liszt Sonata is undoubtedly one of the peaks of the repertoire, and recordings are suitably copious, but when an artist of Hamelin’s virtuoso pedigree wishes to tackle it no excuse need be made for an additional version. The recital opens with a lesser-known masterwork, the Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H, and for light relief there is Liszt’s scintillating supplement to his Italian Année de Pèlerinage, the three pieces of Venezia e Napoli, but perhaps the emotional core of the recital is Liszt’s intensely spiritual Bénédiction du Dieu dans la solitude.

This is a major Liszt recital from one of today’s most admired recording artists.

Luiza Borac’s debut recording on Avie, of the Three Piano Suites by George Enescu (AV 0012/AV 0013), caused a sensation and garnered her unanimous critical acclaim, securing this young Romanian pianist’s place on the musical map. For her follow up recording, Luiza, who has won over two dozen international competitions including the Concours Grieg in Oslo, turns her attention to two pillars of the romantic era, Schubert and Liszt. The composers’ seemingly contrasting temperaments are linked on this CD by a common itinerant theme. Excerpts from Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage are paired with Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy (which Liszt orchestrated). Throughout Luiza applies strength and sensitivity in equal measure, beautifully and vividly brought out by the Hybrid SACD format.

This, the forty-third volume (and sixty-fifth disc) in Leslie Howard's Liszt encyclopaedia, includes the Second Book of the composer's Années de Pèlerinage, a work which derives its considerable inspiration from the art and literature of Italy. Here we find the final versions of the three Petrarch Sonnets and the famous Dante Sonata.

Alongside these works we have Venezia e Napoli, an ingenious set of encore pieces, and the intriguing coda to Au bord d'une source (from the Swiss volume of the Années) which Liszt penned for the young Italian composer/pianist Giovanni Sgambati in 1863.

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’.

Volume 3 ) was recorded at Moscow recitals in 1954 and 1958. None has ever been published before on CD or LP.

The 1958 material included some major discoveries. Most of it is made up of pieces from Liszt’s Années de Pélèrinage, only one of which exists in any other Richter recording. It also offers the offers the only live performance published of Richter playing Beethoven’s famous “Pathétique” Sonata. The 1954 recital includes mostly works of Ravel, including the published Richter performance of Le Gibet from Gaspard de la Nuit , the only selection of that suite he ever palyed. Two more of the Ravel works, Pavanne pour une infant défunte and Jeux d’eau , are the only Richter performances yet published on CD. The disc concludes with three pieces by Rachmaninov and one by Prokofiev.

Liszt’s Transcendental Études bear the dedication “To Carl Czerny with the deep respect of a grateful pupil”. In its ultimate form, these Romantic poems were incredibly far from Czerny’s études, with which young pianists are terrorised at school. The title of ‘transcendental’ points at the exceptional, superhuman technical difficulties which Boris Berezovsky masters with seeming ease. The cycle Years of Pilgrimage was written during travels to Switzerland and Italy when the 24-year-old Franz Liszt had romantically fled Paris with the Countess Marie d’Agoult. The pieces Venezia e Napoli – Gondoliera, Canzone and Tarantella – appeared as an addition to the second, Italian year of L’Années. The dazzling piano score serves not for a demonstration of virtuosity but rather to create coloratura, or rather a fantastical aura of sound around Italian melodies.

“Here, surely, we have the truest successor to the great Russian pianists.” Gramophone

“Can you imagine the famous "Revolutionary" Etude played by left hand alone? Hard to believe. But there it was. And, as with everything else in this concert, it was beautifully shaped. That ability to transcend the physical challenges of such preposterously difficult music was part of Berezovsky's secret. And he sustained it throughout five of Liszt's Transcendental Studies. Virtuosity was more a tool rather than an end. And at the close, after a few impeccably shaped miniatures as encores, one was left thinking that Berezovsky is one of the greatest pianists of our time.” Irish Times