Franz Liszt: Piano Works

Description

No truly great composer lived a more colourful life than Franz Liszt, and of no other great composer can it be said - as it can in his case - that almost one hundred and forty years after their death the music of such an incredibly complex and influential artist should be unknown in its entirety. The rehabilitation of Liszt has been a gradual process, and is certainly not yet fully achieved. Such considerations may still fall within the realm of the specialist, for his most popular solo piano works have always been found in the repertoire of every virtuoso, although it is only in the last few decades that pianists have felt able to programme publicly his lesser-known pieces, Angela Brownridge's selection on this disc is concentrated upon widely-varied music which has long been established as part of the solo piano repertoire - music which has taken its rightful place alongside masterpieces for the instrument by Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann or Brahms. Not that every item here can be said to be fully familiar, even to the regular concert-goer, but taken as a whole this programme affords a conspectus of Liszt in various guises: the master of original large-scale form alongside smaller, transcribed gems; the arch-Romantic who understood the music of his great predecessors better than any of his contemporaries, one whose own original music - for all its powerful empfindsamkeit - was initially firmly rooted in the precepts of the classical masters. - Robert Matthew Walker