‘Franz Liszt’ – How to approach such a gestalt? Unsystematic, paradoxical and excessive, it doesn't fit into any common scheme and it eschews all simple categorizations. What a topic for our own era with a popular culture fond of magic and superhuman features, and a mixture of market-orientation and pseudo-religiosity! Franz Liszt, the most celebrated 200-year-old musician of 2011 as a mirror for today's audiences? Perhaps, since even those who are not ‘typical’ classical music lovers easily find at least one or two aspects in his life and work to admire.Footnote 1 Liszt was a man of contradictions: the ultimate pianist of his time, he ended his career as a travelling virtuoso at age 35; he was both royalist and utopian socialist, abbé and socialite, a living legend who nevertheless remained unrecognized and even disdained as composer, conductor, writer on music and impresario. He was an omnivore and nomad of music, who wrote for all genres, absorbed very different kinds of music and synthesized seemingly incompatible styles into his own, his influences ranging from late Beethoven to Rossini, from Bach to Bellini, from plainchant to the music of gypsies. Like Igor Stravinsky, his true home was musical history, and what Milan Kundera wrote of the Russian master, applies also to Liszt: ‘He did all he could to feel at home in music history: he lingered in each room of that mansion, touched every corner, stroked every piece of the furniture.’Footnote 2 Franz Liszt was a universal musician during a time of growing specialization and blooming nationalism, a bold innovator, who founded modern piano music as well as the symphonic poem but who also had socially committed works to his credit. He was a radical who dismissed cemented genres and eschewed traditional compositional techniques, most generously promoting the modern music of his time. An artist of great curiosity, Liszt prophesied microtonal and dodecaphonic music, ventured into atonality in his late works, and was even interested in the music of non-European cultures. In short: he was a creative mind incredibly ahead of his time. At the same time, though, he was an over-prolific composer and an alcoholic, whose list of works include masterpieces and visionary inventions alongside fluff pieces of disconcerting banality. Sometimes it is hard to believe all this was written by the same man: the Sonata in B minor with its perfection and formal rigour and ‘Les Préludes’ with its melodramatic pathos, the fascinating experimentalism of a great deal of works and the schmaltz of ‘Liebesträume’, the reticence of his chamber music or the melodramas and the pianistic circus acts of the ‘Hungarian Rhapsodies’, the acerbic and misanthropic world of the late works and the furious extravagance of the ‘Études’. Even within a single work audacious twists and ingenious ideas could seamlessly clash with truisms and redundancies. Liszt was a man of extremes, on whom opinions have always diverged, and who has kept generations of trash biographers busy; often mistaken – even today – as a mere poseur, he is also justly seen as the godparent of modern music. Nowadays, Liszt seems to be firmly rooted within the concert repertoire and the popular mythology alike, but, in fact, he still largely remains to be discovered. One might recall Vladimir Nabokov's sigh: ‘Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure novelist.’Footnote 3

As regards the Liszt discography, it remains clear that even after the recording of Liszt's Complete Piano Works on 99 CDs in 1985–1999, which earned pianist Leslie Howard an entry in the Guinness Book of Records, this larger-than-life composer remains an unexplored continent in many ways. Much of his orchestral and pianistic output is not known at all, and this remains true also for the bulk of the songs, as well as for the chamber music, the organ works or the choral works, which all contain epochal artistic creations. Countless interpretations of the great B-minor Sonata, and an immense number of recital discs with virtuoso pieces or sweet gewgaws, contrast with an astonishing lack of recordings of a great many central works.

An anniversary year is a good opportunity to put the record straight. All in all, the bicentennial of Liszt's birth has indeed seen the release of several fine recordings. Above all, one would like to mention a spectacular ongoing recording project of Liszt's complete orchestral works with period instruments – more on that later. Furthermore, it is a special cause for joy that the accomplished lied duo Matthew Polenzani and Julius Drake have begun a complete edition of Liszt's neglected songs. Several CDs of Liszt's hitherto unknown chamber music have been released: the distinguished Trio Wanderer couples Liszt's late miniatures and his trio version of Vallée d'Obermann with Smetana's Piano Trio, an unusual combination that makes perfect sense; there is a recording of Liszt's complete works for violin and piano on two CDs by Friedemann Eichhorn and Rolf-Dieter Arens released by Haenssler, and an exciting compilation of chamber works for two to four instruments under the title Visions, issued on the Oehms label. It is a pity, though, that the chance has been wasted to reissue several landmark recordings. I am thinking especially of Ivan Fischer's enthralling CD with selected symphonic poems, the ground-breaking recording of Via Crucis by the Netherlands Chamber Choir under Reinbert de Leeuw, de Leeuw's deeply insightful CD of Liszt's late piano music and Horacio Gutierrez's excellent rendering of the Sonata in B minor. It is a particular pity that Peter Eötvös's Liszt interpretations – especially that of the symphonic poem Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne – have not at all appeared on CD and that Evgeny Kissin's interpretation of the B-minor Sonata, a milestone in the performance history of this work, has not been commercially released. But these flaws are compensated by a couple of fine new discs, which are as interesting from the conceptual as from the interpretational point of view. The first impression, though, is of being bombarded by kitschy compilations such as Liszt – wild and crazy (DGG) and of flamboyant portrait CDs of alleged or real virtuosos. Of the latter, jewels have been released such as a double album with Evgeny Kissin's complete Liszt recordings: though of little conceptual interest, it includes imaginative, hyper-virtuosic and profound reference recordings. An enjoyable release is also a new CD of Nelson Freire, the grand-seigneur of the piano, whose noble playing is light-years away from the self-sufficiency of many a young virtuoso. However, it is a pity that Freire's selection resembles a smorgasbord rather than a representative cross-section of Liszt's pianistic cosmos.

The high gloss photo on 23 year-old Lise de la Salle's recital CD might seem to suggest that her CD belongs to the category of recordings celebrating a ‘rising star’ rather the performed music itself. Already the selection of works gives a lie to this assumption. De la Salle, one of the most noteworthy pianists of her generation, has consequently chosen works which have nothing to do neither with the glamour of the salon nor with the mere cult of pianistic dexterity. It is a very comprehensive selection: central large-scale works such as Funérailles, the ‘Dante’ Sonata and the Ballade in B minor are represented as well as the genre of Études with Mazeppa, the late works with Nuages gris and the transcriptions with the ‘Lacrymosa’ from Mozart's Requiem – a discographical rarity – and well-chosen reworkings of Schumann, Schubert and Wagner. The coupling of the pieces is characterized by contrasts, and de la Salle fully succeeds in reflecting the arc of suspense of a felicitous live recital. Though several of these works have already been given authoritative recordings, the distinct musicianship and analytic clarity of de la Salle's playing sets her apart. Her recording of Après une lecture de Dante, to name an example, might be one the best interpretations of this immensely tricky piece, which so easily disintegrates into a mingle-mangle of details. De la Salle meets the challenge of balancing the work's improvisatory trait with the inherent elements of the sonata form, she makes the transformation of themes intelligible and builds up the hallucinatory suspense from the bold, deliberately primitivist beginning until the very end with aplomb. These qualities are also fully displayed in her renderings of other major works such as Funérailles or the Ballade No. 2, which much too often suffer from unreflecting interpretations. De la Salle's command of the musical line is particularly impressive, recalling even great masters such as Gilels or Arrau. Furthermore, de la Salle isn't seduced by any need to show off with her formidable virtuoso gifts: in an exemplary way she proves that virtuosity is, first and foremost, part of Liszt's formal strategies and nothing to be wasted for mere showy gestures. On the other hand, she also resists the temptation to simply organize the structural material, but lets the music evolve naturally and with great subtlety. Her playing might not be entirely impeccable. There are occasional slight rhythmical insecurities quite understandable in her frantic rendition of Mazeppa, but slightly odd in a piece such as the Mozart-Liszt ‘Lacrymosa’. But no one expects 23-year-old de la Salle to be the finished article, and such minor flaws are more than compensated by the orchestral colourfulness of sound, the extraordinary structural clearness and wonderfully thoughtful music-making. Conceptually as well as artistically de la Salle's CD is successful, and a similarly good introduction to Liszt's piano works as Arcadi Volodos's legendary 2007 album.

Marc-André Hamelin has frequently been called the super-virtuoso, and with his Liszt album he again proves why he fully deserves this honorary title. Nevertheless, one has mixed feelings about the overall result, which proves what a delicate and complicated issue Liszt interpretation is after all. To name the positive aspects first: Hamelin plays wonderfully unpretentiously, with stunning virtuosity and a crisp sound that recalls the brilliance of a skyscraper. Never have the repetitions of the ‘Tarantella’ from the Venezia e Napoli sounded so effortlessly controlled, and that despite the breakneck speed. Whether we take the octaves of the B-minor Sonata or the dense textures of the Fantasy and Fugue on the theme B-A-C-H, we experience magic moments from a pianistic angle of view. Which is all well and good; but are accuracy and terrific speed the principal objects here? Sviatoslav Richter, to name one example, refrained from showing off his staggering virtuoso skills in the ‘Tarantella’ and instead revealed the multiple facets inherent in even this relatively minor work with delicate shadings and refined agogics. The gain? A much more stunning result than Hamelin's tour de force execution. One knows from contemporary accounts that Liszt criticized virtuosity for its own sake and, instead, urged his pupils to search for the poetic concept of each piece. Now, to be fair, Hamelin steers well clear of any exaggerations. But he doesn't fully succeed in building tension, which is so essential for a memorable performance of both the B-minor Sonata and the Fantasy and Fugue. Hamelin is not a pianist of surprises, and with Liszt, the self-confessed composer of ideas, an immaculate and overtly sober execution misses the heart of the music. This is not to say that Hamelin is less than a musician of great sophistication and a pianist of wonderfully controlled dexterity. The problem is rather that Hamelin doesn't give Liszt a flavour of his own. He fails in creating the illusion of an orchestra in his rendering of the B-minor Sonata, though sound is clearly a vital part of Liszt's structural thinking. The Fantasy and Fugue on the theme B-A-C-H was originally written for organ, but Hamelin – unlike Kun-Woo Paik – doesn't even try to simulate the original sonority. Nor are the audacious harmonic language and the bold clashes of different stylistic allusions of this Bach homage brought to the fore. Jean Guillou once demonstrated impressively on the organ how to capture the baroque, exalted character of this work. Guillou's improvisational attitude is not Hamelin's cup of tea, which is fine. But Hamelin sometimes seems to speed over the surface of the music without even hinting at its hidden intricacies and bizarreries. Marc-Andre Hamelin is undoubtedly a virtuoso of excellence and great culture, but what is lacking in this CD is a creative spark and a dash of madness.

Liszt attracts not only great virtuosos but also other curious minds. Gregorio Nardi is a pianist and musicologist, who has made himself a name by giving the world premieres of quite a few forgotten piano works, by Robert Schumann, Brahms, Schönberg and Ives. Years ago, he recorded three CDs of Liszt's music, which stand out from the bulk of the usual recital albums because of their clever concept. The most interesting of these were Vom Tode, a delightfully various overview of Liszt's works referring to death, and Le composizioni religiose per pianoforte. Unfortunately, both recordings have been unavailable for some time. Nevertheless, the first of Nardi's Liszt albums, Rare Piano Works, has now been reissued. The title is misleading: though the Variations on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, the Fantasy and Fugue on the theme B-A-C-H or the delightful Berceuse are not as well known as they deserve to be, they are still firmly represented on the recording market. Strictly speaking, the epithet ‘rare’ fits only the Schubert-transcriptions Litanei and the operatic paraphrase Réminiscences des Puritains, of which Nardi's recording was in fact the first ever at the time of the CD's original release in 1989. The common denominator here is ‘music about music’: Liszt's art of transcription is being displayed in all its facets – ranging from arrangements (Litanei) and paraphrases (Réminiscences) all the way to recomposition and redevelopment (Variations, Fantasy and Fugue, Berceuse). Regarding the paraphrases, it would have been a good decision to choose a more representative work than Réminiscences, that lengthy piece of virtuoso Gebrauchsmusik from Liszt's youth – not a difficult task, one might think, considering that the paraphrases in Liszt's oeuvre amount to thousand minutes of music. Apart from this weak choice, however, this album is an insightful overview of Liszt's recompositional practice, and it is good to have Liszt's two weighty Bach homages on the same disc. A big minus is the near-disastrous recording quality, the sound being depressingly flat and dry, thus dispossessing the piano of its orchestral capabilities. Nardi's playing itself might not be great pianism. The formal grandiosity of the Variations on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, to name but one example, has been realized much more convincingly in the recordings of Alexeeve, Brendel or Maisenberg. And with the Fantasy and Fugue, Marc-André Hamelin's already discussed rendering is pianistically on altogether another level. Nardi's achievement lies in illuminating aspects that his manually more gifted colleagues often tend to overlook. His improvisatory approach in the Variations is particularly convincing, especially in the stringendo-passage before the concluding Bach-chorale. Nardi's agogic skills and his keenness to highlight unexpected details and contrasts is a particular skill, which stands him in good stead with these both Bach-homages. What remains odd, though, is the dryly historicizing attitude in the beginning of the Fugue of the Fantasy and Fugue. Nardi seems to forget here that Liszt's allusions of Bach are never mere acts of worship. However, he is also capable of bringing ‘Litanei’ and Berceuse, the poor recording quality notwithstanding, into full bloom. A worthwhile CD, which would have benefited from a more consequent selection of works, for instance, by concentrating on Liszt's works related to Bach.

Those who search for classical grand pianism will be eager to obtain Garrick Ohlsson's new recording. After his release of Chopin's complete works and other encyclopaedic recording projects, Ohlsson has finally recorded the B-minor Sonata alongside a compelling rarity, Busoni's transcription of the monumental, half-hour long organ work Fantasy and Fugue on the choral Ad nos, ad salutarem undam. The performance of the Sonata is rather disappointing, insofar as Ohlsson fails to realize the work's revolutionary structure. What great interpreters of this piece – such as Kissin, Gilels and Arrau, to name but a few – sensed was Liszt's economical handling of the form: tiny details and interval structures reflect the grand structure, a technique foreshadowing strategies of the Second Viennese School. Ohlsson fails in seeing the big picture – the tempo relations are not clear enough, and he is overtly fussy about details. Curiously, Ohlsson gets this all right with the other work on the disc: the Fantasy and Fugue. Originally an organ work, it is doubtlessly one of Liszt's weightiest works and an example of the composer's ability to transform the most inconspicuous materials into pure gold. Beyond the daring harmonic language and the masterful structural conception of the piece itself, it is Busoni's phenomenal transcription that makes this work an unqualified delight. The neglect of this work in both the concert repertoire and the Liszt discography remains unfathomable. One cannot, therefore, be grateful enough to Ohlsson for discovering this exceptional work, especially as his playing possesses dynamism, subtleties of touch and an understanding for the work's seamless musical span. It is to be hoped that an adequate complete recording of Busoni's fascinating Liszt-transcriptions will appear soon.

Even today, Liszt's works are often merely regarded as showpieces, their interpretational complexities being in turn severely underestimated. This clichéd notion of Liszt has been reflected in a bad tradition of pianists often seen as Liszt's incarnations: super-virtuosos such as Simon Barere, György Cziffra or – to some extent – Vladimir Horowitz, who were keen to indulge in arbitrary changes of the text and other coquettish exaggerations. A notoriously extreme example for this attitude was Horowitz's own version of Scherzo und Marsch, in which he, apparently oblivious of the work's sonata structure, turned it into bits and pieces. Even more recently, pianists such as Ivo Pogorelich or Mikhail Pletnev – though not going so far as Horowitz by any means – take considerable interpretational liberties, which lead to occasionally mannerist and at the same time oddly predictable performances. From contemporary accounts such as those by Alexander Borodin, we are informed that Liszt was highly critical of unlicensed interpretational liberties and that he tended as a performer towards an ideal of clarity and congruity. Furthermore, one should not forget that Liszt was – in his critical editions of works by Beethoven, for instance – an advocate of the fidelity to the text and thus almost a precursor of the notion of the Urtext edition. While Liszt seemed have to been strict about respecting the letter and spirit of the score and while he usually didn't accept modifications or abbreviations, he nevertheless encouraged his students to add their own ideas to his ‘lighter works’, such as his paraphrases, rhapsodies and transcriptions. From this, one might assume that the scores of these works are rather skeletal and that the performers are expected to improvise and embellish. This tradition of ad lib playing and improvisation has, however, been broken, which is a challenge to modern performance practice for a group of works that represent about one-fifth of the composer's total piano oeuvres. Steven Mayer has recorded Liszt's Wagner- and Weber-transcriptions as part of Naxos’ ongoing edition of Liszt's complete piano works. Mayer is an impressively proficient and cultured pianist; he plays with great accuracy and is fully faithful to the score; but something is missing. This is hardly a plea for Horowitz's transcriptional practice, which occasionally explored the boundaries of good taste, but Mayer's enterprise – and that of that of most other pianists recording Liszt's transcriptions – has an antiquated air in itself and doesn't, all skills notwithstanding, convey much insight. Liszt's great accomplishment as a transcriber was mainly to acquaint the audience of his time with still unknown and controversial cutting-edge music they could not otherwise get to know. What is the point of reproducing these touching documents of generosity and pedagogical fervour today, in our era of unlimited reproduction? Perhaps one should rather dare to use Liszt's transcriptions merely as a starting point – but who would be able to do that? It tells a lot about the dilemma that it was Glenn Gould, this scorner of Liszt, who succeeded – with his iconoclastic recording of Liszt's transcription of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony – in finding a fresh approach to Liszt's transcriptional practice.

Liszt, the first composer to write music about visual arts and to be strongly influenced by the arts in general, was also the first advocate of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Thus it seems quite appropriate and up to date that Naxos has issued a multimedia product about Liszt, consisting of an anthology on two CDs, a booklet consisting of a biography of 50,000 words, written by Malcolm Hayes, plus the access to a website including hours of extra music and other bonus material. The result is a mixed bag. To begin with the positive, Hayes succeeds brilliantly in balancing between reader-friendliness and expertise in his excellent concise introduction to Liszt's life and works. Especially positive is that he offers valuable insights and suggestions especially regarding Liszt's lesser known, modernist works. In light of this, it is quite surprising that the CDs and website are such failures. The musical interpretations are of varying quality, but that is not the problem. What is fatal is the absence of an overarching concept. To make sense of a gigantic oeuvre and a most eventful life such as Liszt's one needs to find something acting as a continuous link or theme of the whole. And with this adventurous composer's life and artistic career, there are several interesting leitmotifs available. One particularly striking one is that of the artistic innovator and great modernist, which Liszt was already in his youth. To begin with, why are the early radical works missing from this compilation? I am thinking of pieces such as the 1834 version of Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, of Apparitions or Lyon, the latter being also a rare example of Liszt's utopian socialism. Instead of such important early works, we are offered occasional music such as transcriptions of Rossini and of Schubert. What is even more unacceptable is that Liszt's songs, his inventive melodramas and his great organ works are entirely missing. And why has no chamber music been chosen? One further wonders whether Orpheus and the first movement of Von der Wiege zum Grabe really represent the cosmos of the composer's orchestral output aptly. In contrast, the religious genre has been overrepresented with 11 of total 25 tracks. Religious music was certainly close to Liszt's heart, but this is still too much of the good thing. And wouldn't it have made more sense to choose excerpts from the oratorio Christus, a main sacred work, than a divine banality such as the piano piece Urbi et orbi? The Transcendental Étude Mazeppa is confronted with its earliest version, an innocent little exercise by 14-year-old Liszt, which is a clever idea. But the rest of the selection is strangely pointless: two Hungarian Rhapsodies, three paraphrases, a few Études, a few pieces from Années de pèlegrinage, a ten-minute excerpt from the B-minor Sonata and so on. All in all, this anthology is a dull and incoherent affair, ultimately failing to give a clue about the lure and the complexities of the life and oeuvre of a mythic figure. The bonus website is a big disappointment as well. Interactivity could be a chance to learn more about the various cross-cultural influences on Liszt as well as about the manifold connections between his music and the contemporary society. To put it mildly, this chance has been missed. A timeline of events during Liszt's life is included, which is fine, but hardly enough to satisfy one's curiosity. The rest consists of ill-chosen bonus recordings: a complete recording of the Hungarian Rhapsodies adds nothing to the picture, nor does it make much sense to include a handful of short excerpts from the works of his contemporaries. Undoubtedly, it is difficult to create a comprehensive picture of such a complex and enigmatic figure as Liszt, but Naxos has clearly wasted a great opportunity, which is a shame especially regarding Malcolm Hayes’ highly insightful booklet.

But now to a fine example how something meaningful can be told about a composer's position in musical history: Pierre Laurent Aimard's double album named The Liszt Project is a great delight. In this concept recording, the French pianist, a tireless advocate of modern music, puts carefully chosen works by Liszt into a dialogue with those of his artistic heirs – Wagner, Scriabin, Ravel, Bartók, Messiaen and, surprisingly, the fifty-two-year old Marco Stroppa. Aimard creates interconnections both of purely musical and of a programmatic-thematic nature: Liszt's Le Jeux d'eau a la Villa d'Este forms an obvious pair with Ravel's water games; Thrénodie, a grim miniature of the aged master, bears striking resemblance to Bartók's Dirge; the sinister Unstern! corresponds perfectly with Scriabin's Ninth Sonata, better known by its nickname ‘Black Mass’; Saint Francois d'Assise la predication aux oiseaux is here combined with a piece from Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux, and with Marco Stroppa's post-Boulezian virtuoso study Tangata manu, the latter referring to the cult of the birdman on Easter Island. The most striking musical correspondence might be that between Unstern! and Scriabin's Ninth Sonata, the former appearing like a ‘preluding’ improvisation around the latter. Liszt's Vallée d'Obermann, the apparently indispensable B-minor Sonata and a few late pieces round off the picture, as do Alban Berg's Sonata op. 1 and – as a mere curiosity – Richard Wagner's Sonata in A-flat major. Of course, one could question Aimard's choices. After all, it is impossible to draw a comprehensive picture of Liszt's artistic legacy on a double album – considering that he was a major influence on a great amount of composers from the early twentieth century (Ferruccio Busoni: ‘We are all descended from him’). So, Aimard could well also have chosen certain works by Busoni, Szymanowski, Debussy or the early Schoenberg – these being just the most obvious and prominent examples from the age of classic modernism. Who would expect, for instance, that Liszt and Satie would make a fascinating pair? But this is what the excellent piano duo Ranki and Klukon revealed a few years ago in an exceptional CD with forgotten original piano transcriptions of the former's Via crucis and the latter's Socrate, two works of radical austerity and outsiderness. And regarding contemporary composers, there are quite a few composers who have spoken of their fascination with Liszt's compositional thinking, including figures as diverse as Pierre Boulez, John Adams, Heinz Holliger and Georg Friedrich Haas. Back to Aimard: it is a bit surprising that he didn't incorporate any of Liszt's Études, especially, as it would have been intriguing to confront them with Bartók's Three Etudes, a work both radically avant-garde and connected to Liszt's heritage. That heritage is still alive in Ligeti's Études, of which Aimard is the leading exponent but which he didn't choose for this CD. It would have been revealing as well to include Iannis Xenakis's iconoclastic Evryali, an ‘étude to end all études’ exaggerating extreme virtuosity nearly ad absurdum and which – with some fantasy – can be seen as a modern counterpart of the radicalism of the Études d'exécution transcendante. What is missing most though is York Höller's piano music, which – though entirely modernist in its language – refers explicitly to the Lisztian heritage even on its structural level. In particular, Höller's Piano Sonata No. 2 – Hommage to Franz Liszt Footnote 4 with its creative reworking of quotations and ideas from Liszt's piano works would have been a highly adequate and fascinating choice. One also wonders why Aimard chose Richard Wagner's Piano Sonata in A flat major, which is clearly the odd piece out here, as it doesn't reflect anything of the bold spirit representative for all other works on this CD. Wouldn't it have made much more sense to record Liszt's transcription of ‘Walhall’ from Das Rheingold, to name but an example? All criticisms notwithstanding, Aimard's CD is highly enjoyable and one of a kind. The interpretations are – for the most part – very convincing and ear opening. Especially the late works have found a great interpreter in Aimard, who performs them with utmost earnestness, comparable only to Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's and Reinbert de Leeuw's excellent recordings. Aimard succeeds fully in treating these austere pieces as weighty musical works of utmost consequence and not as aberrations of an embittered, isolated alcoholic, as they are sometimes still misunderstood. One recalls the poet Tomas Tranströmer's lines about Liszt's La lugubre gondola, in which the former compared the work's musical language with meteorites: ‘Too heavy to rest, they can only sink and sink straight through the future all the way down.‘Footnote 5 This liaison of the prophetic and of a weird timelessness hinted at by Tranströmer is captured beautifully by Aimard, who takes every note of this musical prose seriously. His Liszt interpretations are generally characterized by utmost sobriety and preciseness, and he mistrusts, occasionally to the point of excess, the grandiose facade and offensive virtuosity popularly associated with Liszt. Which is fine, as Aimard also captures the poetry of the works and has a fine sense of the line. Works such as Vallée d'Obermann or Saint Francois d'Assise: La prèdication aux oiseaux, both of which are too often performed in a schmaltzy way, benefit from Aimard's strictly structural and yet lyric conception. And it is needless to say that the other composers from Berg to Stroppa are performed with great proficiency by an expert of modern music such as Aimard. Occasionally, one might be missing the fantasy and the creative madness of the Liszt interpretations of legendary pianists such as Argerich, Kissin or the young Horowitz. But Aimard's sober and clear approach is a welcome change and it works well with one exception, which is the B-minor Sonata. Crucial for the interpretation of this grand work is to understand the constant change of different poetical characters via transformation of themes. Here Aimard fails by his overtly static interpretation, and also seen from a purely pianistic point of view this performance is not a particularly memorable one. In total, though, this exciting concept album cannot be highly enough recommended and it is a must for anyone interested in musical history.

For the sake of completeness it should be mentioned that a few albums of piano works performed on period instruments have been recently released. Despite the often charming results in Tomas Dratva's recording of a selection from Années de pelegrinages (Oehms) and in Cora Irsen's Liszt anthology (Harms) – both performed on Liszt's Bechstein grand piano in Weimar – these are no revelatory recordings comparable to their equivalents on the symphonic sector (more of which later). One reason for this might be that while Liszt's piano writing had a strongly utopian aspect and while it thus was frequently at odds with contemporary instruments, his orchestral thinking seems to be more rooted in the prevalent apparatus and aesthetics of his time.

While the value of Liszt's contribution to the piano repertoire is basically undisputed, this is not the case with his orchestral works. Two very different conductors from beyond the mainstream have now set about retrieving Liszt's honour with exciting results. A Hyperion album featuring Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, consists of rare works, a small wonder considering the young conductor's adventurous spirit: Volkov's wide-ranging repertoire lays special focus on radical contemporary music and his discography includes recordings of precious rarities by Britten, Janáček, Roslavets and nineteenth-century composers. But his Liszt recording might be the most spectacular: it formidably challenges the popular caricature of Liszt's orchestral works as pompous. For instance, take the half- hour long Trois odes funèbres, a forgotten work, of which this is the only available recording. Though these funeral odes were written in the early 1860s, they already anticipate Liszt's late style in their radical introversion, extreme chromaticism and austerity. These erratic blocks are fine examples of the composer's defiance of symphonic conventions and traditional formulae. One cannot be grateful enough to Volkov for reviving these unique pieces, especially when they are performed with such clarity. Indeed, clarity is the apt keyword to characterize the approach of Volkov, who dismisses any kind of pathos almost to the excess and who distances himself from Karajan's monolithic aesthetics. Everything has been reduced to its essentials, and that is often beneficial: to give one example, Liszt's chamber-like, ‘polychrome’ orchestration is realized beautifully. Volkov successfully demonstrates that Liszt – contrary to popular belief – was a highly innovative orchestrator who knew what he was doing. His refreshingly cool-headed approach fits the Trois odes funèbres best. In Liszt's latest symphonic work, the tone poem Von der Wiege zum Grabe, Volkov captures the King Lear-like simplicity, but fails to create contrasts quite necessary to build up tension in this stark piece of music. This is especially apparent in the second movement, named ‘The Struggle for Existence’. Volkov's rendering is lacking the ‘Allegro barbaro’-like fervour characteristic of Solti's or Haitink's interpretations, and thus robbing the work of its only climax. The disc contains also a recording of the Two Episodes from Lenau's Faust. There exist, of course, myriads of recordings of the second episode, ‘Dance in the Inn’, better known by its subtitle ‘First Mephisto-Waltz’, but it is highly uncommon to hear the both Episodes performed together. This is a pity, since ‘Mephisto's mad whirl of earthly pleasures mocked’ in the second piece is ‘a perfect foil for the awesome fatalism of Faust's vision on his night ride’, as Leslie Howard aptly puts it in his sleeve notes. ‘The Night Ride’, an extraordinary and unjustly neglected piece, which ranges stylistically from highly dissonant passages to the plainchant quotes in the middle section, gets an excellent performance, which fully captures its poetry. ‘The Dance in the Inn’ is commonly regarded as an orchestral showpiece par excellence – something Volkov, a conductor capable of great virtuosity, avoids at all costs. The overall mode is that of an almost provoking sobriety; it fits the picture that Volkov has chosen the more discreet, rarely performed alternative ending. Ultimately, he never quite captures the work's poetic essence, which is at least partly dependent on virtuosity pushed to the boundaries of the possible. Solti demonstrated in his famous recording how ferociousness and structural clarity can be balanced with bravura. And there is the recording by René Leibowitz and the London Philharmonic from 1960, which – though technically somewhat amateurish from today's perspective – aptly demonstrates that excesses with regards to tempi and affect suit this music perfectly. Both Solti's and Leibowitz's renderings present a frenzied virtuosity, the fast passages sounding partially almost like anticipations of Ligetian sound-fields. Such sensuous and instinct-driven musicianship is clearly not Volkov's cup of tea; instead, he is fully committed to analysis and transparency. It is good that Volkov shuns of self-indulgent, audience-exciting climaxes and other exaggerations. The question remains, however, whether one doesn't miss the point of this work's semantic structure by overlooking the ardour and frenzy so inherent to it. Peter Eötvös, for instance, has demonstrated how ‘modern’ thoroughness and clarity can well be brought into balance with both the expressive and the speaking principles of Liszt's orchestral music. This is a quality Volkov doesn't always achieve in this recording. But then, perhaps he is more up to posing questions than to searching for definitive, classical answers. As with Boulez conducting the established repertoire, one might be first puzzled and even provoked by Volkov's coolly analytic approach. But ultimately, interpretations of this kind achieve something important: they prompt to use one's own ears and to discover details hitherto unnoticed because of sloppy traditions and unquestioned listening habits.

The major orchestral Liszt recordings from this year are the two first volumes of the recording project of Liszt's complete orchestral works by Martin Haselböck and his Orchester Akademie Wien, which is done on period instruments. Jos van Immerseel and Anima Eterna have already recorded a Liszt album employing period instruments, but it doesn't rank among their best recordings and doesn't convey great interpretational insight; the Viennese project, in contrast, has the potential of becoming a milestone both in the Liszt discography in particular and in the history of period performance recordings in general. It bears the title The Sound of Weimar, which refers, of course, to Liszt's court orchestra in Weimar. Haselböck's orchestra consists of 38 musicians, corresponding to Liszt's; the strings players use gut strings and many of the woodwind instruments employed here were played in orchestras conducted by Liszt. The first CD, consisting of the ‘Dante’ Symphony and the virtually unknown Evocation à la chapelle sixtine, reveals how remarkably inventive Liszt was as an orchestral composer. His instrumentation, which was often scorned, is now fully being rehabilitated: these Viennese pioneers demonstrate that Liszt made the music speak by means of chamber-musical contrasts and by individualization of timbre. The performances are of utmost clarity and coherence, dispelling popular prejudices about Liszt the orchestral composer – Haselböck and his fabulous musicians must have gone through a painstaking process in deciphering the composer's message. There are several recordings of Liszt's ‘complete tone poems’ available, but none of them is indeed complete. Haselböck has set the task to record the whole output, including some great rarities. One of these is Evocation à la Chapelle Sixtine, better known in its organ version, a double transcription of two motets by Mozart and Allegri, and a fascinating example of Liszt's ability to create music from music. The highlight of the CD is, however, the performance of the ‘Dante’ Symphony, which sets new standards. It succeeds fully in bringing out the music's tight structure; the attention to detail is especially notable, and Haselböck demonstrates convincingly the development of the grand form from small cells. Noble detachment is the prevailing interpretational mode here: Haselböck wisely chooses the ‘Dante’ Symphony's more intimate alternate ending, and never do the musicians wallow in superficial effects. Something of the spontaneity of Solti's, Fischer's or Sinopoli's renderings might be lacking, but this is fully compensated by the earnestness and brilliance of the performances. In the realm of sound, one clearly feels that Martin Haselböck, the all-round musician, who has already recorded Liszt's complete organ works, has found fruitful parallels between Liszt's great organ writing and his not less inventive orchestration. He not only switches individual sections of the orchestras on or off like organ stops, but he also finds, as he writes in the booklet, ‘similarity between some massive blocks of orchestral sound and the dark colours of the romantic organ, the possibility to darken, to structure and sharpen the orchestral colouring of Liszt's orchestra.’ The result is stunning. This disc is a spectacular start for a major recording project that is likely to refute popular prejudices about Liszt and improve the appreciation of his orchestral works. It would be about time. After all, Liszt belongs – by and large – among the composers who have had the misfortune of falling between the cracks of music history, partly because of the peculiarities of reception history and partly because their oeuvre indeed appears highly paradoxical. In 1970, Carl Dahlhaus, who was essentially very appreciative of Liszt's innovative achievements, suggested that the historical importance of Liszt's symphonic poems was considerably greater than their aesthetic value: ‘The anticipatory structures were wasted by Liszt by using a language in which these were suffocated, as it were. To do justice to them without being bothered by the music in the very understanding of the music, one would have to read the Symphonic Poems instead of listening to them. They have, to put it ruggedly, become entertainment music on the one and paper music on the other hand (the term ‘paper music’ being understood in a nondepreciative manner).’Footnote 6 In other words, Dahlhaus considered Liszt's orchestral music, though being of essential documentary importance, to be dead and obsolete as regards its aesthetic exterior and repertoire value. Now, one could raise the question whether his latter judgement might at least partly be influenced by insufficient performance practices and erring traditions. One remembers, for instance, that Janáček's or Mussorgsky's orchestral writing was not fully appreciated as long as their works were interpreted through the filter of late-Romantic tradition. Regarding Liszt's symphonic works, there exists a popular habit of performing them in a highly monumental and even pompous way, which does little justice to their often complex orchestral textures, and which runs the risk of turning Liszt into a second- or third-rate Wagner. In the light of some early recordings, it seems that this may be an invented interpretational tradition rather than something close to original intention. To name an example, Oscar Fried's Liszt recordings from the 1920s (which include Les préludes, Mazeppa and Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2) are characterized by a complete absence of cheap effects. A similar phenomenon holds true for the historic recordings of pianists such as Ferruccio Busoni and Egon Petri, in which virtuoso exaggerations commonly attributed to Liszt are completely absent. Just as Richard Strauss's 1927 recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony possesses interesting similarities with Norrington's 1989 recording as regards tempi and overall character, it seems that looking back to the very past might be a way to find new insights with Liszt's work as well. Haselböck's recording project is proof of this. It shows a way forward and might at least partly succeed in bridging the gap between the historical importance and the aesthetic value of Liszt's works as observed by Carl Dahlhaus.