Liszt: Gondoliera, S. 162 No. 1 (from Venezia e Napoli)

Melodiya presents an album of Grigory Ginsburg, a wonderful virtuoso pianist and one of the glorious representatives of the Russian piano school of the 20th century.

Ginsburg’s name is now overshadowed by his some of his better known peers such as Emil Gilels, Sviatoslav Richter, Yakov Flier, Stanislav Neuhaus and others. Meanwhile, in his time in the 1930s-1950s, his concert performances entranced audiences and critics alike.

This album comprises compositions by Franz Liszt and Anton Rubenstein’s Piano Concerto No. 4. Ginsburg’s interpretation of the concerto became a model for musicians of many generations.

Played by present-day and past masters of the keyboard, here is the ideal follow-up and complement to our Wild and Crazy Liszt compilation.

Liszt, the virtuoso, played all the keyboard literature and travelled the roads and seas; Liszt, the thinker, nourished his intellect through his readings of Lamennais, Lamartine and Hugo, Shakespeare and Byron, Dante and Petrarch, Goethe and Schiller; Liszt, the composer of songs, indebted to Italian bel canto, the French romance and the German chorale, set texts written in six languages, not including Latin. Hesitating between pure creation and transcription, which called upon his gifts as a wizard of the keyboard throughout his lifetime, he thus paid tribute to every facet of Western art, as may be seen from this recital, or "soliloquy", to use his own expression.

Tristan Pfaff, born 1985, studies with Michel Beroff and has been doing the rounds of the International Piano Competitions, winning the Arcachon. He came third in the recent Scottish International [Oxana Shevchenko was the winner].

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.

Grigory Ginzburg (1904-1961) was perhaps the most astounding virtuoso to emerge in Soviet Russia and it is a tragedy that he was never allowed to travel to the west after the mid 1930’s. He focussed his repertoire very much on the 19th century Romantic period and, above all, in Liszt, and his prolific recordings include many of Liszt’s virtuosic opera paraphrases that had fallen into neglect. This CD is the first of two devoted to his earliest 78rpm recordings mainly dating from the 1940s. These discs are extremely rare and many of the performances included will be unknown to even the most ardent collectors. The disc finishes with the most astounding performance of the greatest virtuoso warhorse of the 19th century – Balakirev’s Islamey. Ginzburg’s supremely elegant performance shows total control in even the thorniest passages, for him it appears no more difficult than a Haydn sonata, and the result is that we hear so much more in the music than is normally the case.