Writing in the 1970s, Jean-François Lyotard distilled the sensibilities of postmodernism down to an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’.Footnote ¹ With Marino Formenti’s Liszt Inspections, we are given a performative realization of this ‘incredulity’, as the pianist seeks to cast suspicion upon standard historiography. The CD explores the correspondences between Liszt’s body of work and diverse repertoires of the twentieth century, suggesting a far more fluid view of history. The experimentation Liszt undertook in the twilight of the nineteenth century holds a significant place in this theme Formenti plays upon. The CD’s programme suggests the circularity of history, with twentieth-century modernisms echoing alongside their nineteenth-century forbearers.

Formenti includes works not strictly limited to Liszt’s late period. For example, Liszt’s Il Penseroso from the Années de pèlerinage II: Italie (1838–49) precedes Galina Ustvolskaya’s Sonata No. 6 (1988); the pairing is at first stark and jarring, but the underlying parallels between the two works gradually reveal themselves. Ustvolskaya’s relentlessly pounding homophonic texture and her interest in exploring timbre are remarkably similar to Liszt’s approach when musically representing Michelangelo’s sculpture of the thinker above the tomb of Lorenzo de Medici. The same use of stark registral contrasts to generate forward momentum is also found in Liszt’s Funérailles from Harmonies poétiques et religieuses III (1848–53), programmed two tracks earlier and paired with Wolfgang Rihm’s Klavierstück No. 7. The CD’s programme thus suggests an integrated network of relationships between twentieth-century modernists and Liszt, furnishing the listener with a great deal of interpretive freedom to seek and find connections between them.

For example, Formenti cites constructivism as a link between Liszt’s Bagatelle sans tonalité and the rules guiding Ligeti’s Touches bloquées (1985) and Pesson’s Speech of Clouds (2003). Liszt organizes his ‘atonal’ piece around a central nexus of pitches that serves as the basic principle from which the entire bagatelle develops. In the same way, Ligeti constructs his Touches bloquées as an étude centred around a group of ‘blocked’ keys, depressed and unsounding. Ligeti’s composition constantly subverts its own forward motion through strategic interruptions, each dictated by the basic framework Ligeti has devised. In a similar way, Pesson’s Speech of Clouds manipulates basic spectral features of sound. Pesson instructs the performer to continuously depress three keys throughout the work, resulting in a constant resonance that floats in the background of the composition. Formenti does an excellent job of accentuating this novel timbral effect – a static drone, just on the border of inaudibility.

Liszt’s interest in the sound of the piano is one of the chief themes that runs throughout this CD. For instance, Formenti approaches Liszt’s Au lac de Wallenstadt from the Années de pèlerinage I: Suisse (1848–54) as essentially a water study that parallels Luciano Berio’s own mimetic exercise, Wasserklavier (1965). This particular work by Berio contributes to the CD’s postmodern condition, with its allusions to both Brahms and Schubert creating complex intertextual pathways. Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire (1992), a short work by Tristan Murail (one of the figureheads of French spectralism), is a concise and dreamy homage to his teacher Olivier Messiaen, incorporating subtle allusions to the elder composer while also exploring the spectral capacities of the piano. Formenti’s meticulous pianistic control in this particular work is gripping: it is a kind of bell study, built upon the clangs of complex vertical sonorities. The ensuing track, Liszt’s Cloches du soir (1875–76), is another bell study, explicitly invoking extramusical imagery and complementing well Formenti’s simultaneous delicacy and precision.

Berio’s Brin (1990) is an étude, restricted to only a small number of pitch classes that are varied in new configurations. The various alterations to the arrangement of pitches throughout the work serve as an intriguing complement to Liszt’s aphoristic Wiegenlied (1881). Formenti emphasizes the ephemeral qualities of this late cradlesong, particularly Liszt’s sparse texture, while subverting the metrical lilt characteristic of the genre. Ligeti’s En suspens from his second book of Études pour piano (1988–94) continues Formenti’s interest in études and the ways in which they focus on a single compositional phenomenon or a technical problem. And whereas Liszt’s En rêve (1885) has passages that disavow any semblance of metre, Ligeti’s En suspens (1988–94) requires its performer to keep track of multiple metres, played concurrently (and, by Formenti, quite scrupulously).

Through Formenti’s juxtapositions, it is easy to hear Liszt not as a Romantic, but as a mid-century modernist, one interested more in effect than design. Formenti’s performance of In festo transfigurationis Domini nostri Jesu Christi (1880) suggests this quality in Liszt’s music, with its remarkably stripped-down triadic arpeggiations providing a decidedly non-teleological sense of pulsation enhanced by the slowly moving bass beneath. This interpretation is amplified by John Adams’s short minimalist essay China Gates (1977), which employs perpetual arpeggiations of modal pitch collections to explore the piano’s timbre in an idiosyncratic minimalist process of shifting from one modal area to another. The technical difficulty in Adams’s work arises chiefly from incessant rhythmic repetition and arduous hand crossings. Formenti delicately handles and reconciles this highly active and polyphonically dense musical surface with subtle pedalling and a subdued dynamic level.

In total, Formenti’s ‘inspection’ of Liszt’s pianistic oeuvre is insightful, blending technical precision with a sense of balance that seamlessly links together an outwardly disparate repertoire. The resulting effect of the CD is akin to an aural palimpsest, in which Liszt’s original work is gently subsumed into the surrounding twentieth-century compositions. Distant traces of the original remain while radically new gestures, conventions and traditions are introduced, making manifest the dynamic nature of musical influence.